COVID-19 vaccine trials: Live updates

Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, researchers all over the world have joined the race to develop an effective vaccine. In a recent feature, Medical News Today outline how the search for a vaccine progressed throughout 2020.  According to Moncef Slaoui, Operation Warp Speed chief adviser, “We know that for the Moderna vaccine, giving half of the dose to people between the ages of 18 and 55, two doses, half the dose, which means exactly achieving the objective of immunizing double the number of people with the doses we have.”The developers of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine have signed an agreement with AstraZeneca to test a combination of both vaccines, according to the Associated Press.  

AstraZeneca and partners from the University of Oxford published the results of some of their vaccine candidate clinical trials earlier this month in The Lancet, demonstrating 70% efficacy after two doses of the experimental vaccine.

Days later, the company announced that they were considering testing their vaccine candidate in combinations with others. 

“Assessing different types of COVID-19 vaccines in combination could help unlock synergies in protection and improve vaccine accessibility and could provide an additional approach to help overcome this deadly virus,” a press release said. 

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have given the Moderna vaccine emergency use authorization (EUA), making it the second vaccine with EUA in the United States. Already, the U.S. has agreed to purchase 200 million doses. Officials expect that healthcare professionals will give the first shots this morning.

On Friday, the FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn said that the move is “another crucial step in the fight against this global pandemic that is causing vast numbers of hospitalizations and deaths in the United States each day.”

As with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the Moderna offering is also an mRNA vaccine. However, the Moderna vaccine does not require ultra-cold storage during transportation, which will make it easier to supply to more remote and rural areas.