A second potential vaccine for Covid-19 has reported large-scale trial results showing almost 95% effectiveness.
The world has been holding its breath this year waiting for a vaccine to be developed for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. There have been over 55.1 million confirmed cases of the virus worldwide at this point, with 1.33 million deaths and a large percentage of infected people requiring hospitalisation.
A potential vaccine from pharmaceutical company Pfizer was recently found to be 90% effective in a large trial, and news came that the vaccine could reach over half a million of the most vulnerable people in Northern Ireland by the end of the year. The Pfizer vaccine was one of several in development currently, and now another has announced its trial results.
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A new vaccine candidate from US pharmaceutical firm Moderna has been reported to have 95% effectiveness, similar to the 90% reported by Pfizer. The data comes from a placebo-controlled trial of 30,000 people in the US, and Moderna plans to apply for approval to begin producing the vaccine for general use in the next several weeks.
Both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use the same technique, injecting a mobilised mRNA strand that codes for part of the Covid-19 virus' protein structure. The mRNA enters some of your cells and causes them to produce the protein, which your immune system then recognises. This prompts your immune system to act as if the cells are infected with Covid-19 and you produce antibodies that will fight off a real infection.
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Many older vaccines have been developed using techniques that involve deactivating or damaging a live virus sample so that it isn't infectious but still provokes an immune response, but DNA and RNA based vaccines prompt your own cells to produce the signature of the virus for your immune system to recognise. The technology has taken a long time to develop, but could become an important tool for the rapid development of new vaccines against a range of viruses.
The UK announced that it will be buying five million doses of the Moderna vaccine by Spring 2021, following on from the announcement that it has bought 30 million doses of the similar Pfizer vaccine. The Moderna vaccine has an important difference in that it remains stable at a much higher temperature, so it may be better used in remote areas where refrigeration may not be adequate.
Source: BBC News
