Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was highly optimistic after Moderna released data on its coronavirus vaccine Monday showing a high degree of effectiveness.
“It’s just a historic day in public health to have now this as well as the Pfizer vaccine coming to the American people,” Azar said on CNBC Monday morning.
Pharmaceutical company Moderna announced Monday that its coronavirus vaccine was 94.5% effective based on preliminary phase 3 trial data. Last week, Pfizer announced its vaccine was 90% effective.
Azar suggested that 40 million doses would be available by the end of this year. That’s enough to inoculate 20 million people because the vaccine requires two doses.
“Our goal would be by the second quarter [of 2021] to have enough vaccine for every American,” Azar said.
Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration under President Trump, was equally upbeat on the Moderna news.
“I think what this means is that once we get these vaccines in sufficient quantities heading into 2021… the fact that a lot of the population will have already had COVID combined with the fact that we will be vaccinating the public with a highly effective vaccine, we could effectively end this pandemic in 2021 with our technology,” Gottlieb told CNBC’s Squawk Box.
Gottlieb also suggested that the vaccine would do more than just lessen the symptoms of COVID-19.
“You have to presume at these levels of efficacy that we’re seeing from these vaccines, the vaccines aren’t just reducing signs and symptoms of COVID disease, but they’re actually preventing some people from getting infected or … reducing the likelihood that people shed the virus,” Gottlieb said. “That’s going to be an important thing to look at in the full dataset.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, celebrated the promising news, saying that it means the science behind both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines works.
“We have now shown with two vaccines that the immune response against the spike protein is a protective response,” Fauci told reporters. “Conceptually, this looks good, and it looks like we’re on firm ground for even continued positive results coming in because of the commonality of the immunogen involved.”
“Now, we have interim analysis, but we cannot distribute a vaccine and do shots in arms until it is approved by the Food and Drug Administration, so we’re still in that planning phase right now,” Operation Warp Speed Vaccine Lead Dr. Matt Hepburn said. “This is the first day we even have some data to start trying to figure out that, you know, which populations are first.”
The team did not say for sure when the first round of doses would be distributed, as that depends on whether the FDA grants approval or emergency use authorization, but Fauci told reporters that the first doses could be available by the end of the year.
“What we’ve been saying all along, the vaccine that we’re talking about and vaccines to come, are really the light at the end of the tunnel,” Fauci said. “In many respects [the vaccine is] already here, hopefully, to be fully implemented in the beginning with doses available at the end of December.”
