Moderna: second covid vaccine to gain US authorisation

Second covid vaccine: On Friday, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) provided authorisation for the emergency use of the covid vaccine developed by Moderna Inc. and the National Institutes of Health. The pharmaceutical company said that the vaccine doses would be available for use by Monday. As soon as the drug company received approval, US President Donald Trump tweeted, “Congratulations, the Moderna vaccine is now available!”

Post the discussion over the vaccine, “Food and Drug Administration (FDA) chief Stephen Hahn said: “With the availability of two vaccines now for the prevention of Covid-19, the FDA has taken another crucial step in the fight against this global pandemic.”

Immunologist James Hildreth, president of Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, during the panel discussion over the vaccine on Thursday said, “To go from having a sequence of a virus in January to having two vaccines available in December is a remarkable achievement.”

The US is the first nation to provide approval to Moderna, which is the second vaccine to be supplied in the country after the first, developed by Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech.

Both Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccine has a success rate, in case of latter it is 94% and is relatively cheaper to transport to different locations as it doesn’t require ultra-freezing temperature for storage as Pfizer, which requires to be kept at −70 °C, where as former can be stored in a −20 °C freezer for 6 months, and in a refrigerator (at about 4 °C) for 30 days. 

Moderna can be taken by anyone 18 years old or above, where as Pfizer said that its dosage can be taken by even 16 year olds. Commending the quick development of both the vaccine, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said that two work “better than we almost dared to hope, science is working here, science has done something amazing.”

The two were developed in a record time of within a year. Collins assured people that the speed of the vaccine development should not be a point of concern for people as he stressed that the early outcome was  result of billions of dollars of investment doled into i

company along with government investments and years of earlier scientific research. Collins said,“The rigour of the analysis of these vaccines is unprecedented. We’re not done with this but hope is on the way, and the hope comes from this scientific brain trust that has pulled out all the stops.”

FDA has issued few directions for the vaccine shots including: both the vaccine require two dose shots with second to be taken after several weeks and from the same company as the first one.

Both the vaccines provide a slight ray of hope to the nation, a week before Christmas. The coronavirus pandemic has claimed over 312,000 lives in US alone and about 1.7 million lives worldwide. The current average of number of new cases in the US is over 216,000 per day.