Moderna’s CEO said the company’s new COVID-19 vaccine could prevent infection for years.
Speaking at a virtual meeting by Oddo BHF, a financial services group, while Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said the once-believed “nightmare scenario” that the vaccine would not work is now out the window is. “We believe there may be some years of protection,” Bancel said.
He explained that the “antibody decay generated by the vaccine in humans is declining very slowly”, reports Reuters.
However, there are still questions about elderly patients because their immune system, as is true with every virus, declines over time, Bancel said.
The CEO also said Moderna is close to proving that the vaccine is effective against others variants of the coronavirus, Reports Reuters.
The US has sent received of both the Moderna and Pfizer BioNTech shots, both of which require two doses with a few weeks apart. The second dose should be from the same company as the first dose. Both vaccines appear safe and highly protective in large, yet unfinished studies.
In November, Moderna announced that the vaccine efficacy against COVID-19 was 94.1% and that the vaccine efficacy against severe COVID-19 was 100%.
Pfizer announced that the vaccine is 95 percent effective against COVID-19, starting 28 days after the first dose. It did not say how long the vaccine would last, but added that its vaccination would take another two years.
The CDC says that because re-infection is possible with COVID-19, even people who have already had the virus should receive the vaccine. According to the CDC, it is still unclear how long the natural immunity, or the immunity that someone acquires as a result of an infection, will last. Natural immunity varies from person to person, and some evidence suggests that COVID-19 will not last very long.