A second pharmaceutical company has announced that it has successfully created a new vaccine to combat the coronavirus.
Moderna follows Pfizer, which announced its own 90% effective vaccine last week, saying it proved better than expected at protecting people from Covid-19 in a pivotal study, a milestone in the hunt for shots that can stop the global pandemic.
The Moderna vaccine was created with help from the Trump administration under the Operation Warp Speed program. President trump authorized almost $2.5 billion to Moderna to fast-track the vaccine.
“Agreements with companies including Moderna, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline, and Johnson & Johnson will secure hundreds of millions of vaccine doses so vaccines can be available to Americans as quickly as they are approved,” he said at the time.
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“We just announced that mRNA-1273, our COVID-19 vaccine candidate, has met its primary efficacy endpoint in the first interim analysis of the Phase 3 COVE study,” it said in a press statement.
In its announcement today, Moderna said that its vaccine would not be widely available until Spring 2021.
Ten other vaccine candidates are in their Phase III trials, and over 50 different vaccines are being developed worldwide, according to a New York Times database.
For pro-life Americans and people worldwide, one of the big questions is whether or not the vaccine is ethical in terms of how it was made and whether cells from aborted babies were used. The Moderna vaccine was developed without using fetal cells. As a consequence, the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute listed the vaccine as “ethically uncontroversial.”
“Both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use synthetic genetic coronavirus material, called messenger RNA or mRNA. When the harmless mRNA enters a human, the person’s immune system fights it, simulating what it would normally do if infected with the actual virus and developing antibodies as a result,” according to one report.
In other words, Moderna’s vaccine was developed using genetic sequencing on computers instead of making it with fetal cells. The Charlote Lozier Institute provides information about the studies showing that to be the case.
That news may materially increase the number of people willing to be inoculated when the vaccine becomes generally available.
