the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Washington DC, Last week, US President Donald Trump provided additional details on Operation Warp Speed, the US plan to rapidly develop, test, and manufacture a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. The program will involve senior experts and leadership from both the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense, and it aims to develop, test, and scale up production for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in order to make millions of doses available by early 2021. This would be a monumental effort and would considerably accelerate the process for any previous vaccine by months or years. One of the project leaders, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, commented that he had recently seen encouraging preliminary data from early clinical trials of a vaccine candidate. This morning, Moderna, Inc., issued a press release describing encouraging preliminary results from its Phase 1 vaccine trial. While Phase 1 trials are designed to evaluate safety of the vaccine in humans, Moderna noted that early data (based on only 8 participants) are promising that the vaccine could induce the development of protective antibodies. More data is required to better characterize the body’s immune response, particularly with respect to the effect on conferring immunity to SARS-CoV-2.