Today's announcement of ~95% efficacy in the @moderna_tx #COVID19 vaccine trial is amazing, auspicious news. 1/8
https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/16/modernas-covid-19-vaccine-is-strongly-effective-early-look-at-data-show/

This coupled with the announcement of >90% efficacy in the @pfizer / @BioNTech_Group vaccine trial is encouraging that these mRNA vaccines have huge promise. 2/8
https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/09/covid-19-vaccine-from-pfizer-and-biontech-is-strongly-effective-early-data-from-large-trial-indicate/

One small note about these trials. It's often assumed that vaccines are only a proxy for immune response to natural infection. However, there's nothing that prevents vaccines from inducing better, more durable protection than natural infection. 3/8

Here, I'm showing a trimmed down figure from Jackson et al ( https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2022483) detailing phase 1 immunogenicity results from the Moderna vaccine. I've trimmed this to show only the relevant dosage that was chosen for the ongoing phase 3 trial. 4/8

You can see that at 36 days after the 2nd dose, titers for binding and neutralization are often substantially higher in vaccinated individuals than individuals recovered from COVID-19 infection (labeled as "convalescent"). 5/8

We see a similar picture for Pfizer / BioNTech in Walsh et al ( https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2027906). I've trimmed this figure to show only relevant dosage and vaccine construct (full spike protein rather than just receptor binding domain). 6/8

Again, titers for both binding and neutralization are often substantially higher in vaccinated individuals after two doses than in recovered individuals (labeled as "HCS"). 7/8

Although it remains to be seen whether these efficacy numbers hold up with time ( https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1328352029190877185), I'm really optimistic about these vaccines. I just hope we can hold off the epidemic for a bit longer to allow time to roll them out to the population. 8/8