“The data speaks for itself, it’s not me, it’s not my opinion, look at the data,” Fauci said. (File)
Washington:
The top infectious disease official in the United States on Monday hailed Moderna’s first Covid-19 vaccine results as “incredibly impressive”, calling the result a validation of the experimental mRNA technology that some had doubted.
“I said, and I have to admit, that I would have been satisfied with an efficiency of 70, or at most 75 percent,” he told AFP.
“The idea that we have a vaccine that is 94.5 percent effective is incredibly impressive. It really is a spectacular result that I don’t think anyone who anticipated would be so good.”
The medical scientist heads the National Institutes of Health’s National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which began co-developing the vaccine in January, shortly after Chinese authorities disclosed the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus.
The vaccine is based on a new technology that uses a synthetic version of a molecule called “messenger RNA” to hack human cells and efficiently turn them into vaccine factories.
“There were a lot of people who had reservations about using something that hadn’t been tried and true over the years, in fact some people even criticized us for it.
On Monday, Moderna and the NIH announced their preliminary results based on 95 of the 30,000 volunteers they recruited who fell ill with Covid-19.
Of the 95, 90 had been in the placebo group of the trial and five in the group that received the drug, called mRNA-1273, which translates to an efficacy rate of 94.5%.
It follows an equally impressive result from Pfizer-BioNTech last week, which reported 90% effectiveness.
When asked if it was too early to say whether the mRNA platform has now been proven, Fauci, who is generally known for his cautious statements, said the jury is out.
“Oh no! I think when you have two vaccines, like this, that have been shown to be over 90% effective, I think the mRNA is there, it has established itself, it doesn’t need any more. to prove anything.
“The data speaks for itself, it’s not me, it’s not my opinion, look at the data.”
As Moderna bathed in the spotlight, Fauci was keen to highlight the critical work of the NIH, which he said was responsible for developing the correct “conformation” or spatial arrangement of the virus spike protein, that the vaccine does inside the body to elicit an immune response.
Looking to the future, he said he was concerned about anti-vaccine sentiment in the United States, the hardest-hit country in the world.
“There is a long way to go – remember, you have to get this distributed, you have to get most people immunized.
“There is a lot of anti-vaccine sentiment in this country. You have to get over that and convince people to get vaccinated because a vaccine with a high degree of efficacy is useless if no one gets vaccinated.”
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
