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Moderna Announces Promising Vaccine Trial Results

Stéphane Bancel (MBA 2000, AMP 170)
Photo by Richard Howard
Moderna released promising news on the progress of their coronavirus vaccine this morning, noting that trials showed it to be 94.5% effective. “In this pandemic, what has been awful from a public health standpoint, an economic standpoint, is the worry people have to get so sick they have to go to the hospital—so sick they have to get to the ICU and have a high risk of dying,” Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel (MBA 2000) told The Washington Post. “If a [vaccine] could prevent 95 percent of people to not get disease, but to not get severe disease, that would be a game-changer: the impact on hospitals, the impact on people’s psyche and the impact on deaths.”
"These are obviously very exciting results," Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN. "It's just as good as it gets—94.5% is truly outstanding."
A December HBS Alumni Bulletin article tracks Moderna’s path to this discovery, which began in January of this year, when it developed a treatment that went concept to clinical-trial-ready in a record-breaking 42 days. The article lays out just how radically fast the Moderna development timeline has been relative to previous vaccines—which have taken up to 13 years to come to fruition. Regarding the competitors in the race to develop a vaccine, though, Bancel makes a point in the December article that is increasingly relevant today as coronavirus cases spike nationwide: “We’re not racing against each other,” he told the Bulletin. “We’re racing the virus.”
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