White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said he hopes the Moderna vaccine will have an efficacy of at least 60% or even higher.
“Obviously, we would like to see it much, much higher. But 60% is the standard that you do for the cutoff. That’s not unusual,” he said. “I would like to see the highest percentage that we could possibly get.”
The percentage means that on average, the coronavirus vaccine could reduce a person’s risk of Covid-19 by 60%.
The Moderna vaccine started the phase-three human trial on Monday. It employs messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA molecules, to produce an immune response to fight the virus. Scientists aim to see the mRNA, which relays genetic instructions from DNA, training the immune system to detect and destroy the virus. mRNA technology has reportedly never been used to create a successful vaccine before.
Dr. Fauci also said that he is not “not particularly concerned” about the safety risk of the Moderna vaccine, despite the use of a new technology to fight the virus.
“It’s a novel technology. We are certainly aware of the fact that there’s not as much experience with this type of platform as there are with other standards,” Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the press on a conference call alongside National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins.
“I’m not particularly concerned,” he said. “But I don’t want a lack of severe concern to get in the way that we are keeping an open mind to look for any possible deleterious effects as we get into and through the phase-three trial.”
Late-stage trial
Scientists could identify whether a potential coronavirus vaccine by Moderna is effective as early as October but will likely present the final results by November, Dr. Fauci noted.
Moderna announced that it has already started its late-stage trial for its vaccine. The trial will involve 30,000 participants from 87 locations, according to ClinicalTrials.gov. Respondents in the experimental arm will get a 100 microgram dose of the potential vaccine on the first day and another 29 days later. Some patients will get a placebo.
If it becomes successful, Moderna’s experimental vaccine would be the first of its kind. Researchers will observe the participants after the phase-three trial for one year to evaluate the safety risks of and two years to check the Moderna vaccine efficacy, according to Dr. Fauci.
A record for the US
Dr. Fauci regarded the potential vaccine as an accomplishment, stressing that the time it took from determining the virus’ genetic sequence to a phase-three trial was a record for the US.
Dr. Fauci’s statements came days after he said that a coronavirus vaccine would not likely be “widely available” to the public until “several months” into 2021.
“It is likely that at the beginning of next year we would have tens of millions of doses available,” Fauci said, noting that some drugmakers have predicted more doses than that. “I think as we get into 2021, several months in, that you would have vaccines that would be widely available.”
Moderna previously announced that it could distribute between 500 million and 1 billion doses per year starting next year.
