Moderna’s Coronavirus Vaccine Candidate Appears To Be 94.5% Effective In Interim Analysis
- November 16, 2020
USA Today (11/16, Weintraub) reports Moderna’s SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate “appears to be 94.5% effective against the” virus. The vaccine was “developed in collaboration with the U.S. government” and, like Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine candidate, relies on mRNA. The article adds that Pfizer recently announced that its own coronavirus vaccine was more than 90% effective.
NPR (11/16, Palca) reports, “The results for both vaccines come from interim analyses of large clinical studies.” Moderna’s trial included 30,000 volunteers with half receiving two doses of the vaccine, and the other half receiving two doses of a placebo. In the trial, “there were 95 instances of COVID-19 illness among the study participants – only five of those cases were in the vaccinated group,” while 90 were in the placebo group.