Moderna chief Medical Officer says Covid vaccine arriving in Australia could be more effective

The first one million doses of Moderna’s Covid vaccine are in Australia as recent studies show it could be more effective than Pfizer or AstraZeneca.

The first one million doses of Moderna’s Covid vaccine have begun arriving in Australia this weekend as recent studies show it could be more effective against Delta than either Pfizer or AstraZeneca.

The Moderna vaccine has been found to be 92-95 per cent effective against Delta compared to Pfizer’s 77 -88 per cent and AstraZeneca’s 67 per cent.

All the vaccines are over 90 per cent effective at preventing hospitalisation and nearly 100 per cent effective at preventing death.

“We don’t have a head to head but what I can tell you is the efficacy that we see with the Moderna vaccine is really remarkable, very, very high efficacy maintained over many months,” Moderna’s chief Medical Officer Dr Paul Burton said.

There were three reasons for this including that the Moderna vaccine is stronger and it has a longer gap between doses (28 days compared to Pfizer’s 21 days) and a lot of work had gone into the fat particles that deliver the mRNA in the vaccine.

“We are able to give 100 micrograms per dose, the Pfizer shot is 30 micrograms a dose… if you have more mRNA, you’ll get more spike protein made and we see a very strong immune response,” he said.

The 28 day gap between doses also helped.

“That time period allows your white blood cells or B cells to go back to lymph nodes and rest and proliferate and make very effective white blood cells that can make a lot of antibodies,” Dr Burton said.

Moderna's Chief Medical Officer Dr Paul Burton.

Almost 350,000 doses of Moderna arrived in Australia on Friday night with a further 700,000 due to arrive Sunday.

Three million more doses each month will be delivered in October, November and December.

The vaccine will be delivered through 3,640 pharmacies around Australia and has been approved for use in anyone aged over 12.

“We expect that these doses will be distributed to more than 1,800 community pharmacies across the country and put in into the arms of Australians in the next week,” Health Minister Greg Hunt said.

“A further 1,800 community pharmacies across the country will start to receive doses the week commencing 27 September,” he said.

Like the Pfizer jab the Moderna vaccine is an mRNA vaccine that works by delivering a person’s cells the instructions to make a spike protein from Covid-19 that then provokes and immune response in the body.

Moderna’s Covid vaccine to be delivered by pharmacies from next week.Photo by Joseph Prezioso AFP

Dr Burton said Australians should not be concerned about the safety of the new technology in the vaccine.

The lipid nanoparticle delivering the mRNA was short lived lasting only a few hours in the body and there was no evidence in a study of the vaccine in 6 million people that it interfered with human DNA.

The messenger RNA in the vaccine cannot get its way into DNA, he said.

“DNA is made into messenger RNA, there’s no process in biology to take it back. So the cells can’t incorporate it back into their DNA,” he said.

To date 225 million doses of Moderna have been given to 125 million people and the most common side effects were a fever which can be treated with paracetamol, a small number of people had an anaphylactic reaction to the vaccine.

In very rare cases some people suffered the heart conditions myocarditis and pericarditis but there were no reports of blood clots like those associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine he said.

“Across 6 million people, there were 34 cases of myocarditis, it’s a very rare,” he said.

There was no evidence the vaccine was associated with lowering male fertility, he said.

Pregnant women are being urged to get vaccinated against Covid. Picture Getty Images.

Pregnant women are being encouraged to get vaccinated against Covid and should consult their doctor about using Moderna, he said.

The company is testing new vaccines specifically targeting against the Delta and Beta variants and they could be on the market by the end of this year or early next year, Dr Burton said.

However, he said the extra 12 million doses Australia has ordered for 2022 will be the original vaccine.

Research has shown receiving a third dose of the original vaccine was good enough to boost protection against Delta.

“When we’ve even boosted with this current vaccine, we get a 40 fold increase in antibody levels against Delta,” Dr Burton said.

Moderna is currently testing its vaccine in children as young as two.

“I would think we’ll get those results, you know, shortly before the end of the year, maybe November timeframe,” Dr Burton said.

Originally published as Moderna chief Medical Officer says Covid vaccine arriving in Australia could be more effective