BREAKING: FDA Advisory Committee Approves Moderna Vaccine for Emergency Use Authorization

The FDA advisory committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of approving the Moderna coronavirus vaccine for emergency use authorization.

During a remote vote on Thursday, the FDA’s safety and efficacy review panel almost unanimously endorsed Moderna’s  vaccine, with 20 votes in favor and just one abstention. Exactly one week ago, the same FDA committee voted to approved Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine, which has subsequently gotten full FDA approval and is currently being deployed across the county to inoculate frontline health care workers.

Moderna’s vaccine, though it is also uses mRNA and is a two-shot dose, differs in small ways from Pfizer’s. It does not require extreme cold storage and its lag time between the primary and boost host is four weeks, rather than three. Also, the FDA advisory panel recommended it for only those 18 years and older, while Pfizer’s was cleared for inoculating those 16 and up.

“No one voted against this emergency use authorization,” CNN’s Sarah Murray reported to Situation Room host Wolf Blitzer.  “The next step is it goes back to the FDA to make a decision about whether to grant that emergency use authorization. That could move relatively quickly. We doesn’t know how quickly. The FDA has looked a lot at this Moderna vaccine and put out various recommendations before the independent panel met and discussed this vaccine and voted on it.”

“We know that the supply of vaccines has been extremely limited that’s been getting out to states. That’s another complaint we’ve heard today and various numbers of how many doses they would get of the Pfizer vaccine,” Murray added. “To have this Moderna vaccine on the cusp is huge for the supply of vaccines going out early on. Because of the way this vaccine was developed, Moderna did their vaccine hand-in-hand with the federal government. This was part of the vaccines that was part of Operation Warp Speed. The federal government has very good insight into how this whole process has worked and they just doubled the number of vaccines they preordered from Moderna. The number of vaccines the government has ordered is 200 million. Again, we still have a couple of more steps before we finally get to this emergency use authorization, but it would very surprising if we don’t see the FDA moving swiftly to sign off on this one.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.