Good, and slightly more precise than Pfizer's, news from Moderna:
Stat/Moderna/Dr. Fauci said:
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.
[...]
“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.”
https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/16...s-strongly-effective-early-look-at-data-show/
Now, let's remember Pfizer did not actually publish the spread between treatment and placebo, no age split, and no data on severe infections, only the "at least 90%" conservative efficiency baseline. Given the similarities between Pfizer and Moderna, I almost expect them to hit the same performance within half a percent point or so in the end. Maybe, if we are very lucky, all spike protein targeting vaccines, independent of technology, will hit the 90-95% corridor. The statistically very weak early 92+% reading for the Russian vector virus effort seems to point into that direction.
And what really is the brilliant news here is the 11 to zero split of severe disease. This is the real game changer: If you get the vaccine, even if it does not protect you from covid, it keeps you out of the hospital ("severe", in this case, being defined as "requires hospitalization").
EDIT:
And the tl;dr "What does this mean for the pandemic?" from Derek Lowe:
Derek Lowe said:
I really think that the vaccine results we’re seeing mean that the end of all this is finally in sight. We have to make it through to getting our population vaccinated. Hang on.
EDIT 2:
Stat got the numbers wrong. The press release clearly states 95 infections in total, 90/5 split between treatment and placebo, not 100 total, 95/5 split as quoted above. Does not make a huge difference (.5%), but still need should be noted.
EDIT 3:
Reporting by
Nature puts the worst-case lowest possible efficiency by trial's end at 86% - since epidemiologists put the cutoff for a vaccine efficient enough to end the pandemic and put an end to social distancing at 75 to 80 percent, even that would be more than enough.