Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine is expected to receive FDA emergency use authorization on Friday, December 18, 2020, with distribution set to begin the following Monday.
Like Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine, Moderna’s requires two shots, and is 94% effective in preventing the disease, and lessens its severity in the few who do get it:
“In Moderna’s trial, 15,000 study participants were given a placebo …. Over several months, 185 of them developed Covid-19, with 30 developing severe forms of the disease. One of them died. Another 15,000 participants were given the vaccine, and only 11 of them developed Covid-19. None of the 11 became severely ill.”
Unlike Pfizer’s, Moderna’s vaccine “can be stored in normal freezers and does not require a super-cold transportation network, making it more accessible for smaller facilities and local communities. … These differences suggest that Pfizer’s vaccine may be used more for major institutions with established infrastructure like hospitals, while Moderna’s may be more useful to smaller facilities like a local chain or pharmacist.”
It also differs from the Pfizer vaccine in some details: It requires shots 28 days, not 21 days, apart; and is limited to people over 18, not 16, years of age. And initial distribution will be through a much wider network, at 3200 sites instead of 686 sites for the Pfizer vaccine, because of the less complicated transportation and storage requirements.
Both vaccines are based on messenger RNA, or mRNA, biotechnology — derived from pioneering Nobel-worthy research by Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman (story here) — and have very similar side effects that typically go away after 24 or 48 hours: “injection site pain, fatigue, headache, muscle pain, joint pain and chills …. Swollen lymph nodes have also been reported.”
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