Moderna Vs. Pfizer mRNA Vaccines for Covid-19: The Key Points
Explaining the efficacy and safety profiles, handling protocols, and remaining questions about disease spread and long-term immunity and safety between the two vaccines.
The fastest vaccine the FDA has approved was the Ebola DNA-based vaccine that took about five years. For Covid-19, in less than a year, we already have two candidate vaccines — mRNA-based vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna — awaiting approval this year or early 2021. A record-breaking indeed. How do the two mRNA vaccines compare, and what makes them so effective? And what are the things left unanswered?
Current knowledge
1. Efficacy
While data is yet to be published as formal peer-reviewed scientific papers, Pfizer claimed a 95% efficacy, and Moderna claimed a 94.5% efficacy in preventing Covid-19 infections in press-releases. As Pfizer has not provided as much clinical information as Moderna, this section will focus on the latter.
As it’s our own cells that make it, the protein’s expression and levels are more stable and, thus, enable a more potent immunogenic…
