(Image source from: Ndtv.com)

With over 100 Covid-19 vaccines underway, it seems like the one by Moderna is leading the race. The vaccine made by the U.S biotech firm will enter the third and final stage of the clinical trial in July with over 30,000 participants.

The penultimate and final stage allows the scientists to look through and observe the impacts of the virus in a large population and see whether the vaccine is more effective than the placebo in preventing the impacts of Covid-19. It is to also check whether the vaccine is potent in preventing infection with the coronavirus that can cause the disease.

The study has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and has been done in collaboration with the US National Institutes for Health (NIH).

Moderna’s vaccine has been a trailblazer at this point along with the other option that is being worked on by the University of Oxford with AstraZeneca. Even the latter has launched a large scale trial with 10,000 volunteers and will show the results likely by September.

Moderna has received $483 million from the federal government of U.S for the development of the vaccine.

Later on May 18, the company announced its very first results among all the eight participants for the first phase of testing.

Moderna further exclaimed that if the dosage of 100 micrograms proves effective for building the immunity, the company will likely be able to manufacture around 500 million doses per year. The numbers can even go up to a billion doses as well.

Moderna is one of the five companies that the Trump administration has been consistently pushing for the faster development of the vaccine.

The goal as foreseen by the company and the U.S government is to be able to manufacture 300 million doses of the vaccine by January 2021.

The vaccine formula developed by Moderna includes implanting a specific genetic code of the virus inside the body of the individuals to let the immunity build.

- Somapika Dutta