As coronavirus cases surge around the world, hospitals getting overstretched and economies gasping, Within a week two good news came from two US-based companies – Pfizer (and its partner, the German company, BioNTech ) announced on 9th November 2020 that their mRNA based vaccine BNT162b2 against SARS-CoV-2 has more than 90 percent effectiveness and on 16th November 2020 Moderna claimed its mRNA based vaccine mRNA-1273 appears to be 94.5% effective – a dash of hope?
3. What does it mean?
The Food and Drug Administration( FDA ) had set a bar of 50 percent efficacy for vaccine -it’s far more protective than that with the claim of more than 90% effectiveness.
Currently, more than 150 corona virus vaccines are in development across the globe of which 11 has reached phase III trials mainly United States-Moderna’s (mRNA-1273), Pfizer and BioNTech’s (BNT162), Johnson & Johnson’s (JNJ-78436735), India’s Bharat Biotech and ICMR(Covaxin), United Kingdom’s Novavax (NVX CoV2373), AstraZeneca-Oxford’s (AZD1222), China’s Sinopharm(not named) and CanSino (Ad5-nCoV) are promising.
To date, just two coronavirus vaccine has been approved-both by the Russian Government. Sputnik V and EpiVacCorona but experts have raised considerable concern about both vaccine’s safety and efficacy
The fact that Pfizer and Moderna have gotten encouraging results is making experts optimistic about the entire field.
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