In general some true statements, but the devil is in the details.
#1 - I'll break them out.
- True enough, but this technology has been used in animals for a good 10 - 15 years
- The only true concern is autoimmune reactions, something that ALL vaccines have, the rest are BS
- Yup, this is Moderna's first commercial product, got to start somewhere and for all intents and purposes, Moderna = Pfizer
#2 - Generally true, but a lot of "We don't know yet" here. SARS is a coronavirus and developed vaccines were never deployed because the virus disappeared. Same for the longevity of the COVID-19 vaccine immunity, we just don't know. The vaccines completed clinical studies in late 2020 and the persistence of immunity is a "real time" event so as I type this, we only 4 or so months of data. Hopefully we'll be lucky and it is longer lasting than a few months. Right now it seems to be because the re-infection rate of people who have had one bout with the disease is quite low.
#3 - Disgruntled malpractice lawyers wrote this. Yes, EUA does limit the liability of a company, but the PREP Act does provide compensation at a fixed price, just not at the millions of dollars the lawyers would like.
#4 - First point is the only true statement in the lot. Yes, things were "rushed", but not as a way to circumvent safety. The key steps, usually run in series,
e.g. you don't do step 2 until step 1 is run and completed, the steps were run in parallel where appropriate. This saved precious time. However, the clinical trials of the vaccines, run on humans, were just as extensive as other vaccines, and the observed adverse reactions have been as few, if not fewer, than any normal vaccine. Subsequently, very few, but some, medical professionals have expressed significant concern about the safety and most of these concerns were voiced BEFORE the completion of the clinical trials, which alleviated the concern of most.
If a company had tested a similar vaccine in animals, yes they could skip this step with the COVID vaccine. Now we're talking EXTREME similarity. For example in the J&J vaccine, which uses a technology used in other vaccines, their COVID-19 vaccine's only difference with others of their vaccine on the market, is the substitution of DNA that encodes for the COVID spike protein. A difference of a few nucleic acids in a complex milieu of a vaccine is truly trivial, and animal testing data from other, identical vaccines with the exception of the nucleotide substitution, is no biggie in my scientific opinion, something I have done and proved to FDA on many occasions. FYI, the yearly flu vaccine doesn't even repeat human clinical trials. The only thing that's done is that they choose the viral strains that they'll use and plop them into the "Gold Standard" vaccine mix.
#5 is funny, the lawyers at work again. Name me a single major pharma company that hasn't been convicted of a malpractice and medical fraud charge. What's interesting with this one, is the fact that Moderna "charges" never use the adjective "medical". Sure, start up companies often "embellish" their financials to help increase investment and I'm sure Moderna has had these types of charges, but totally irrelevant to this point.
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