The Moderna vaccine reduced the risk of Covid-19 infection by 94.5%. There were 95 cases of infection among patients who received placebo in the company’s 30,000-patient study. There were only five infections in patients who developed Covid-19 after receiving Moderna’s vaccine, mRNA-1273.
Moderna also released data about the number of patients who had severe Covid-19. There were 11 cases of severe disease, all of them in the placebo group — … [a] point of encouragement for [Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases].
“There was always the concern … since the primary endpoint [of the trial] is just clinically apparent disease, how do we know it’s going to have an impact on severe disease? And the results with severe disease were striking — 11 to zero is very impressive,” he said. At the time of their data release, Pfizer and BioNTech had no severe cases in their study.
Further, Fauci said the Moderna vaccine appears to have been protective in important subsets of participants — the elderly and people from racial and ethnic minority groups, the latter of which make up 37% of the Moderna trial population.
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The Moderna vaccine is given in two doses, 28 days apart.
