MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--SEE COMMENT BY NED BLOCK, WHICH NOTES A SERIOUS POSSIBLE OMISSION IN THIS STUDY
An informative report from Statnews:
The Moderna vaccine reduced the risk of Covid-19 infection by 94.5%. There were 95 cases of infection among patients who received placebo in the company’s 30,000-patient study. There were only five infections in patients who developed Covid-19 after receiving Moderna’s vaccine, mRNA-1273....
Moderna also released data about the number of patients who had severe Covid-19. There were 11 cases of severe disease, all of them in the placebo group — another point of encouragement for Fauci.
“There was always the concern … since the primary endpoint [of the trial] is just clinically apparent disease, how do we know it’s going to have an impact on severe disease? And the results with severe disease were striking — 11 to zero is very impressive,” he said. At the time of their data release, Pfizer and BioNTech had no severe cases in their study...
“It wasn’t as if the only people who were protected were the young people. There were people in the elderly, there were people in the minorities,” Fauci said. Efficacy was “really consistent across all groups"....
Moderna said in its press release that there were no significant safety concerns. Severe events that occurred in greater than 2% of patients included fatigue and muscle pain, which happened in nearly 1 patient in 10, and headache and achiness. These events were “generally short-lived,” the company said....
Both Moderna’s trial and Pfizer’s are continuing and efficacy figures could decline by the time the trials are complete. It is often the case that a vaccine performs less well in the real world than it does in the setting of a clinical trial, experts warn.
Furthermore, data from the two trials do not indicate how long the protection afforded by the vaccines lasts. That can only be determined over time as large numbers of people are vaccinated.
The Moderna results, like those from Pfizer, were disclosed in a press release, not a scientific article, and limited details are public.
