Moderna Vaccine Safety and Efficacy by Sara Alicia Luchini One day, we won’t have to worry about how or when to wear a mask or be concerned with how many people are gathering together. One day, we won’t have to cancel all major life events like weddings, anniversaries, baptisms, and even funerals. One day, we won’t have our hospitals full of COVID-19 patients struggling for their last breath. This one day can happen sooner, because of the creation and deployment of the COVID-19 vaccines. These vaccines were created by highly educated and specialized scientists in the most rigorous and safe guidelines ever held in the history of development of vaccines. It is time we investigate just how safe and effective these vaccines are, so that we all can start living our lives to the fullest. All clinical trials have proven that COVID-19 vaccines have undergone rigorous testing and safety guidelines for administration. When vaccines are created by experts, they must undergo a multitude of scrutiny. This scrutiny comes in the form of testing, questioning, theory, trial, and error, and they must prove that they are safe and effective before the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) will even contemplate reviewing the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. This happens for all vaccines, not just the COVID-19 vaccines. In fact, the vaccines for the novel coronavirus went through the same layers of review and testing as other vaccines. Due to the dire nature of the pandemic, certain barriers to development, related to funding and manufacturing, were removed (CDC, 2021). Therefore, there were no “cut corners” when this vaccine was created, it was created by experts that followed all the same safety and regulations as with all other vaccine creation. The ability for the vaccine to be developed in a shorter amount of time than other vaccines is related to the urgent need for them, where access to funding and resources such as manufacturing were able to be readily available. The cost of creating, manufacturing, testing, and deploying a vaccine is what takes the most time when other vaccines are created. When vaccines are developed, and it takes several years, it is related to the cost of creating and manufacturing. So, when we contemplate the amount of time that it has taken for the development of the COVID-19 vaccines, they are on par for other vaccines, given the amount of funding and resources that have been dedicated to this body of work. The pooling of resources, expertise, knowledge, funding, and other assets is what helped to launch them so quickly. The COVID-19 Vaccine (Moderna) is effective at preventing COVID-19 illness and severe disease. Vaccine effectiveness studies provide a growing body of evidence that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines offer similar protection in real-world conditions as they have in clinical trial settings, reducing the risk of COVID-19, including severe illness, among people who are fully vaccinated by 90 percent or more. That means that once fully vaccinated, meaning after two doses for Moderna vaccine, you would have less than 10% chance of developing severe lifethreatening illness related to the disease process. In addition to providing protection against COVID-19, there is increasing evidence that COVID-19 vaccines also provide protection against COVID-19 infections without symptoms (asymptomatic infections). This is what has made the novel coronavirus so effective at infecting millions of people because it can inoculate and be active in a host (person) and they may not even display symptoms but continue to pass the virus off to others unknowingly. COVID-19 vaccination can reduce the spread of disease overall, helping protect people around you (CDC, 2021). In fact, no cases of severe COVID-19 were reported in the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine group compared with 30 cases reported in the placebo group (Clinical Trial Data, 2021). In clinical trials, this would be interpreted as fully effective against severe cases of the virus, which is what lands patients in the Intensive
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