Moderna’s CEO said the company’s new COVID-19 vaccine could prevent infection for years.
Speaking at a virtual event hosted by Oddo BHF, a financial services company, Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, said it once believed the “nightmare scenario” that the vaccine won’t work now that it’s gone out the window. “We think there may be a few more years of protection,” Bancel said.
He explained that “the decay of antibodies generated by the vaccine in humans is decreasing very slowly,” Reuters reports.
However, there are still questions about older patients because, as with any virus, their immune systems decline over time, Bancel said.
The CEO also said Moderna almost proves his vaccine is effective against others variants of the coronavirus, Reuters reports.
The US has shipments received of both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech shots, both of which require two doses several weeks apart. The second dose must be from the same company as the first. Both vaccines have been shown to be safe and highly protective in large, pending studies.
In November, Moderna announced that the vaccine efficacy against COVID-19 was 94.1% and that the vaccine efficacy against severe COVID-19 was 100%.
Pfizer announced that its vaccine is 95 percent effective against COVID-19 from 28 days after the first dose. It didn’t say how long the vaccine would last, but added that the vaccination test will take another two years.
The CDC says that because reinfection is possible with COVID-19, even people who have already had the virus should get the vaccine. It’s still unclear how long natural immunity, or the immunity someone gains from infection, will last, the CDC said. Natural immunity varies from person to person and there is some evidence that it may not last long for COVID-19.