COVID-19 breakthroughs welcomed

The President of the ESCRS, Professor Rudy MMA Nuijts, has welcomed the announcements of two possible COVID-19 vaccine breakthroughs within the last week. Prof Nuijts said that although some caution was needed following the announcements,there appeared to be some light at the end of the tunnel. On Monday November 16, Moderna Inc. said that its experimental vaccine was 94.5% effective in preventing disease and met the statistical criteria pre-specified in the study protocol for efficacy,according to an analysis of its clinical trial for the mRNA-1273 vaccine candidate. https://www.eurotimes.org/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-breakthrough/ The previous week on Monday November 9, Pfizer and its collaborator BioNTech announced positive efficacy results from their Phase 3 late-stage study of their potential COVID-19 vaccine candidate BNT162 which they said was more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis. https://www.eurotimes.org/ophthalmology-covid-19-pfizer/ "This is of course great news for all of us and brings excitement and hope in these months just before Christmas," said Prof Nuijts. " However,some caution is needed since the logistics around these vaccines (eg. cold storage) are quite extensive and may interfere with quick distribution among the population. Also large vaccination programmes currently may still suffer from capacity issues (eg. for the Netherlands only 10,000 vaccines will be available for the months to come) before mass production and delivery to the population transfers into a smooth process. Nevertheless, we are thrilled to see that there appears to be some light at the end of the tunnel," said Prof Nuijts.

Tags: covid-19 vaccine