The Food and Drug Administration has granted Moderna’s two-shot coronavirus vaccine emergency use authorization, the second vaccine to be approved in one week.
The agency made quick work of authorizing the vaccine just one day after its vaccine advisory panel recommended by a vote of 20-0, with one abstention, that it be approved for limited public use. Similar to last week’s authorization of Pfizer’s vaccine, the first doses of the Moderna vaccine will be shipped out over the weekend to be delivered to U.S. hospital systems Monday through Wednesday.
Gen. Gus Perna, the chief operating officer for the Trump administration’s vaccine initiative Operation Warp Speed, told reporters Monday the administration will ship almost 6 million doses to more than 3,000 locations.
“It’ll be a very similar cadence that was executed this week with Pfizer,” Perna added, referring to the distribution this week of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
The federal government has struck a deal with the relatively new biotech company for more than $3 billion to procure 200 million doses by June. Moderna plans to ship a total of 20 million doses by the end of December, which is enough to fully immunize 10 million people.
Moderna’s vaccine is the company’s first-ever product to be authorized by the FDA. The researchers synthesized a specific mRNA sequence that is uniquely expressed by the COVID-19 virus. This teaches the immune system to attack that specific virus.
Since the company’s founding 10 years ago, Moderna researchers have worked exclusively on fine-tuning the genetic code technology to develop experimental drugs and vaccines. The mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer are the first of their kind to be approved by the FDA. Unlike the seasonal flu vaccine, which injects a weakened form of the virus into the patient to prompt an immune response, mRNA coronavirus vaccines do not contain the virus, making it impossible for people to contract the disease from the shots.
The addition of Moderna’s first doses to the national supply will give the United States a better shot at vaccinating enough people to achieve herd immunity, the point at which the virus cannot be transmitted from person to person.
The U.S. government began its massive vaccine rollout this week, shipping out roughly 3 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine to supply front-line healthcare workers with the first of two shots starting Monday. Over a million people in four countries have received the shots, Bloomberg reported. Twenty-four states have already administered 49,567 shots since then, an early estimate that will surge in the coming days as more states report continuing vaccinations.
