MANILA – Another brand of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine has secured an emergency use authorization (EUA) from the country’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“Upon the review of the documents on Moderna’s EUA application, we found that the benefit of using the vaccine outweighs the known and potential risks,” FDA’s director general Eric Domingo announced on Wednesday.
Moderna’s vaccine has an efficacy rate of 94 percent based on the ongoing Phase 3 trials. However, it is recommended to be used on persons 18 years old and above.
It is also the seventh brand of vaccine that was given an EUA aside from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Sinovac, Janssen, Covaxin, and Sputnik V.
The EUA would allow the government to use the United States-manufactured vaccine in its vaccination rollout as it aims to vaccinate around 70 million Filipinos this year.
Last week, vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. said the country placed an initial order of 200,000 doses of Modernas’s vaccine.
The government also plans to procure 20 million more shots and will be used in the public and private inoculation programs./PN
