Moderna Inc. said its Covid-19 vaccine was 94.5% effective in a preliminary analysis of a large late-stage clinical trial, another sign that a fast-paced hunt by scientists and pharmaceutical companies is paying off with potent new tools that could help control a worsening pandemic.
The highly positive readout comes just a week after a similar shot developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE was found to be more than 90% effective in an interim analysis.
Both shots rely on a technology called messenger RNA that has never been used to build an approved vaccine.
Soon, millions of people around the world could be spared from illness by the breakthroughs.
“It’s extremely good news. If you look at the data, the numbers speak for themselves,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was one of three people briefed on the data by an independent committee Sunday morning. “I describe myself as a realist, but I’m fundamentally a cautious optimist. I felt we’d likely get something less than this. … I said certainly a 90-plus-percent effective vaccine is possible, but I wasn’t counting on it.”
A first analysis of data from more than 30,000 volunteers showed Moderna’s vaccine prevented virtually all symptomatic cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, the company said in a statement today.
Moderna shares rose as much as 15% in New York.
The rally in global shares following the news represented about $567 billion in market value added to the MSCI All Country World Index.
Only five participants who received two doses of the vaccine became sick, compared with 90 coronavirus cases in participants who received a placebo, according to a review by an independent data safety monitoring board appointed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
The vaccine also appeared to be effective in preventing the most serious Covid-19 infections.
There were no severe cases among people who got the vaccine, compared with 11 in volunteers who received placebo shots, according to Moderna’s statement.
An independent data committee, convened by the National Institutes of Health, analyzed the results Sunday morning. Stéphane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna, said in an interview that he spent the morning trying to distract himself from wondering about the results by working at his home in Boston, but instead he found himself constantly checking his phone and email.
When he learned the results later in the morning, the evidence that the vaccine prevented severe disease stood out as most consequential.
“In this pandemic, what has been awful from a public health standpoint, an economic standpoint, is the worry people have to get so sick they have to go to the hospital — so sick they have to get to the ICU and have a high risk of dying,” Bancel said. “If a [vaccine] could prevent 95 percent of people to not get disease, but to not get severe disease, that would be a game-changer: the impact on hospitals, the impact on people’s psyche and the impact on deaths.”
Many questions about details remain.
How long will the protection last?
Will results be similar across all subgroups? Does the vaccine decrease the infectiousness of the virus in people without symptoms?
But the early successes show the power and speed of a new vaccine technology never before used in an approved medical product that delivers a strip of genetic material called messenger RNA to teach the body to defend against the virus.
The messenger RNA carries the blueprint for the distinctive spike protein that dots the outside of the coronavirus, instructions that the body’s cells follow to build the spike protein.
“It is extremely encouraging,” said Stanley Plotkin, inventor of the rubella vaccine. “This and the earlier result shows that the platform really works, and this bodes very well for other diseases, where this platform could be used — and considering the speed with which the platform was put into operation. It’s an excellent result.”