A Vaccine for COVID-19 is on the Horizon
This week, two pharmaceutical companies, Moderna and Pfizer, claimed that they have viable COVID-19 vaccines that are 94% and 90% effective, respectively. These announcements come as new infections rise across the country and around the world.
The pandemic has killed 1.3 million people worldwide as of Nov. 17, 2020, including almost 250,000 in the United States. California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a press release that he is “pulling the emergency brake,” and placing 94.1% of California’s population back into the most restrictive tier of reopening. The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) also updated their guidelines to provide clarifying information about when face coverings are required. The guidelines state that all people are required to wear coverings outside of their homes, with some exceptions based on age, disabilities, and medical conditions.
Dr. Anthony Fauci called the current pandemic response “disjointed” in the absence of a unified national strategy. He noted that the virus doesn’t see borders; nevertheless, a patchwork of states like New Mexico, California, and New York are creating travel restrictions in order to curb the travel of the virus during the upcoming holiday season.
As the pandemic rages, these vaccines offer some optimism that the end may be near. President-elect Joe Biden, however, doesn’t want to give false hope, saying on Nov. 9 that the prospect of a “dark winter” still persists.
A drive-through COVID-19 testing sight at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Los Angeles, California on Monday May 18, 2020. All residents of the city of Los Angeles are encouraged to get tested as the city starts phased reopening. (Maxim Elramsisy / The Corsair)
Moderna and Pfizer are the first two companies to announce positive results in their respective vaccine trials, and they differ greatly in their respective backgrounds. Pfizer is over 170 years old, and considered a perennial Fortune 500 pharmaceutical giant. Moderna is a very well-funded, 10-year-old biotech company that has never brought any products to market or had any vaccines approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Both trial vaccines are based on a method involving Messenger Ribonucleic Acid (mRNA), a different process compared to traditional vaccines. In this new process, mRNA instructs the cells to produce its own fragments. This theoretically mimics a real viral infection more accurately. These technological advancements have significantly reduced the time necessary to develop a vaccine. Rather than using traditional methods of growing vaccines in vivo — meaning using cells or eggs — mRNA vaccines are completely made in vitro, i.e. a test tube, theoretically allowing them to be produced more quickly. However, mRNA vaccines have never actually been produced and scaled.
Moderna’s vaccine was approved by the FDA for a Phase One clinical trial, just one day after their CEO, Stéphane Bancel, met with President Trump in a roundtable where companies competed for federal funding through Operation Warp Speed, a program to develop and distribute COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics. The emergent nature of the pandemic may warrant the speeding up of normal regulatory procedures, as long as safety is not sacrificed.
The Moderna and Pfizer vaccine candidates are based on the same protein, called the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which comes as good news to other companies with vaccine candidates in the pipelines. Research from previously identified coronaviruses, like those that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and middle east respiratory syndrome (MERS) led scientists to focus on this specific protein, which is on the surface of the virus and allows it to fuse and merge with cells in an infection.
Moderna and Pfizer both issued press releases announcing the results of their trials, and each described trials wherein groups that received the vaccine became infected with COVID-19 over 90% less than the groups that received the placebos. Moderna’s trial included 30,000 participants, while Pfizer had more than 44,000 participants.
While these results are promising, much of the data has yet to be released and it all still requires a significant amount of independent review by boards at the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and likely others.
The trials may provide answers about how effective the vaccines are against the virus, but many more answers can only come with time. Scientists are still unsure how long immunity against the virus lasts once taking the vaccine, if the vaccine provides a protective effect against severe disease to those who still get infected, if vaccinated but infected people transmit disease in the same way, and if people will be trusting enough of the vaccine to get it.
Dr. Fauci and other health experts stress the importance of still continuing the day-to-day public health measures that we know can mitigate the spread of the disease: wear a mask, maintain social distancing, keep good hygiene, and stay healthy.
