Moderna ’s COVID-19 Vaccine Is 94.5% Effective. Here’s What That Really Means

It’s wasn’t a typical Sunday morning for Dr. Stephen Hoge, president of the biotech company Moderna, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. They were at their respective homes in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., waiting to to be let into a Zoom call to hear the results of the very first COVID-19 vaccine that was tested in people. The hosts were members of the independent Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) that is reviewing data involving all the COVID-19 vaccine candidates supported by the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program, and Hoge and Fauci were expecting the call to be about the first results from a vaccine Moderna and NIAID had developed together. With the pandemic continuing to infect record numbers of people around the world, a lot hinged on what the DSMB would say. The DSMB includes leading experts in the fields of infectious disease and vaccinology, as well as biostatisticians and ethicists, and is reviewing the first batches of study data for the first hints of efficacy. None of the people volunteering for the vaccine studies, nor the doctors running them, nor the companies sponsoring them, know what is being injected into the arms of the participants—half get an experimental COVID-19 vaccine, and half get a placebo placebo—so nobody knows if the vaccines being tested are working or not. Except the members of the DSMB. They are the only ones that can “unblind&...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news