Coronavirus vaccine trials have delivered their first results — but their promise is still unclear

Coronavirus vaccine trials have delivered their first results — but their promise is still unclear

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Moderna vaccine sparks an immune response US biotechnology company Moderna’s messenger-RNA-based vaccine is safe, and provoked immune responses in all 45 healthy volunteers in its early-stage trial. The news might be familiar — the firm preliminarily announced its findings in a May press release. Now the results have been published in a peer-reviewed paper, with further details. “The hallmark of a vaccine is one that can actually mimic natural infection and induce the kind of response that you would get with natural infection. And it looks like, at least in this limited, small number of individuals, that is exactly what’s happening,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the branch of the US National Institutes of Health that conducted the trial. The vaccine will proceed to further clinical trials (it’s too soon to say whether it actually works). STAT | 6 min read Reference: The New England Journal of Medicine paper