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Respiratory therapists and nurses work in the Covid-19 alternative care site, built into a parking garage, at Renown Regional Medical Center in Reno, Nevada, on Wednesday.
Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
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15:18
US coronavirus cases surpass 17m
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15:11
Raphael Warnock calls out racist, ‘outsider’ attacks
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14:26
Biden picks Deb Haaland for interior secretary – report
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14:09
More than 30 US states file antitrust lawsuit against Google
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13:02
Today so far
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12:53
Biden to nominate Michael Regan to run EPA – report
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10:49
Trump says he will veto defense bill
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The US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) vaccine advisory panel is now debating the only voting question of today’s hearing: does the totality of the scientific evidence support that the benefits of Moderna’s vaccine outweigh its risks in people aged 18 and older?
The debate is the only agenda item between now and a little after 5pm ET, so we should expect a vote in the next couple hours. The committee is expected to recommend the FDA authorize the vaccine for emergency use. The FDA does not always follow the advice of its independent committees, but it usually does.
If the panel recommends the FDA authorize the vaccine, it would be the second highly effective vaccine authorized to prevent Covid-19, after the FDA authorized a Pfizer vaccine last week.
Moderna’s vaccine has a couple of distinct advantages over Pfizer’s vaccine. While the vaccine is roughly as effective as Pfizer’s (94% versus 95%) current data appears to show that Moderna’s vaccine helps prevent severe disease in the people in which it does not prevent Covid-19. Pfizer’s vaccine may also help with this, but the data does not currently exist to make this conclusion.
Second, it does not require the ultra-cold storage required for the Pfizer vaccine. It still requires cold storage at -20C (-4F), but that is significantly less challenging than the first candidate. That means it might be easier to transport to rural communities.
Raphael Warnock calls out racist, ‘outsider’ attacks
Speaking to a crowd of supporters in Clarkston, Georgia, Senate candidate Rapahel Warnock called attacks from Republicans labeling him a parachuting outsider “absurd,” declaring he’s “Georgia through and through”.
“What happened 3 Nov was not magical or mystical,” he said. “This is the new Georgia, this is the blue Georgia.”
The reverend later took specific aim at Republican rival Kelly Loeffler, who was recently forced to condemn a white supremacist she was photographed with.
Warnock insisted the incumbent senator should “ask herself why people like that are attracted to her campaign.” The Democrat called out Loeffler for coveting QAnon support and peddling racist rhetoric that he said fuels attacks that position white residents as the only real Georgians.
He went on to highlight his generational Georgian roots through the life of his mother.
“My mother is from Waycross, where she grew up in the 50s picking somebody else’s tobacco and cotton,” Warnock said. “But now, in this new America, those 82 year-old hands get to pick her youngest son to be the next United States senator.”
Meanwhile, Loeffler is originally from Illinois.
One of the key challenges facing the incoming Biden administration is how to tackle misinformation and skepticism around the Covid-19 vaccines, the first of which has been rolling out across the country this week.
Social media giants such as Facebook and YouTube have taken some steps to try and stop the spread of misinformation on their platforms, but health experts and officials are also calling on local media outlets to make sure their coverage does not offer a platform for baseless anti-vaccine claims.
According to reporting from NBC News published today, a recent newscast on WFXG-TV in Augusta, Georgia, a Fox affiliate, did just that.
A story on a local veterans affairs center becoming one of the first to receive vaccine doses “quickly pivoted to a small group of ‘concerned mothers’ holding large black and red signs outside the hospital with messages familiar to people who have followed the anti-vaccination movement and its dangerously misleading position,” NBC News reported.
David Williams, WFXG’s news director, declined to comment.
“This is the problem of information laundering,” Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University, told NBC. “If you make a harmful position sound reasonable, then more people who would otherwise not be inclined to believe it, might be willing to look at it as an issue with two sides.”
The vice president of pharmacovigilance at Moderna, Dr David Martin, said the company analyzed data from its phase III trial of more than 30,000 people for evidence of allergic reactions.
Allergic reactions have become important to monitor, following three allergic reactions among the tens of thousands of people who have received Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine in the UK and the US.
Martin said there were two allergic reactions in the Moderna trial, one in the placebo group, and another in the vaccine group. The allergic reaction in the person who received the vaccine happened more than 60 days after the vaccine was administered in a person who had a history of asthma and allergic reactions to shellfish.
Martin said researchers determined the allergic reaction was related to a separate medical procedure. Because the rate of allergic reaction is the same in the placebo and vaccine group, it supports the idea that the vaccine did not cause the reaction in the vaccine recipient.
“Working together we can enhance public confidence in the vaccine through robust vaccine safety monitoring,” said Martin.
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