Vaccine Table Update: April 27, 2021

Pfizer

• Looking good against P.1 (here) and B.1.526 (here)

Moderna

• Looking good 6 months post-vaccination, as expected (here)

• Looks good against B.1.526 (here)

• Because Pfizer is looking good against P.1, we assume that Moderna will work just fine too (here)

J&J

• Looking like it still works against B.1.351 (South African strain) and P.1 (here)

New double mutant variant

• Added a line in the table, but we have no information yet on vaccine effectiveness. Will post about this new double mutant variant soon.

And because everyone always asks…

1. Adolescent trials: I do not have an update on the Pfizer adolescent trial. Remember we need 2 months of safety follow-up data for an emergency authorization from the FDA. After we have the data collected, it needs to be cleaned, analyzed, and presented. This takes time. Last time we got a data update (here) was on March 31 with 1 month of data. So, my best guess is we should have an update by mid-May? Then the FDA meeting needs to be scheduled, they have to meet, and then it has to be authorized by the CDC.

2. Novavax: I don’t have an update about this trial either.

3. Efficacy vs. neutralizing antibodies? There are two ways to measure how well a vaccine works: Efficacy and immunogenicity. Immunogenicity is a more complicated metric that measures the type of immune responses that the vaccine generates and their magnitude over time. Unfortunately, there is currently no definitive set values that “define” a protective immune response (we are still working on this). So, we just know that immunogenicity is “lower” against variants, but we don’t really know what that exactly means in terms of efficacy. Also, there are a lot of different lab studies to measure immunogenicity. So, we can’t compare neutralizing antibodies from one study (like among Moderna) compared to another study (like for Pfizer).

Love, YLE