Moderna vaccine is local vaccine and local vaccine is fresh

Pfizer’s vaccine

• Must be kept at –70 degrees C (–94 degrees F)
• It can then be stored at that temperature for six months.
• This is an ultralow cold chain. It requires a special freezer so Pfizer created special thermal shipping boxes called cool boxes.
• It is not distributing through Operation Warp Speed, so it will ship large thermal boxes of filled vials, jammed with dry ice, via companies such as UPS and FedEx to locations around the country.
• If a facility does not have an ultracool freezer it can kept in the thermal shipper/cool box it has to replace the dry ice within 24 hours and again every five days.
• After day 15 from when the vials were shipped, they have to be transferred to refrigerated temperatures
• Once transferred to a refrigerator, it must be administered within five days.
• The place doing immunization adds a dilutant, creating five doses. At that point the solution is good for six hours.

Pfizer will make its U.S. vaccine in Kalamazoo, Mich.
Pfizer also has a production site in Belgium

Moderna’s vaccine

• Must be shipped at –20 degrees Celsius (–4 degrees Fahrenheit)
• It can then be stored at that temperature for six months.
• This is a “frozen” cold chain, at –20 degrees C (more like a regular freezer) and the standard medical freezer temperature.
• It will ship vials to McKesson Corporation’s distribution center in Irving, Tex., the hub of the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed vaccination initiative.
• Once thawed and kept in a refrigerator between two and eight degrees C (36 to 46 degrees F) it is good for up to 30 days.
• No dilution required prior to vaccination
• Once the vaccine is removed from the refrigerator for administration, it can be kept at room temperature conditions for up to 12 hours.

Moderna will manufacture its vaccine in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Indiana.
Moderna also plans to manufacture in Switzerland and Spain.

Sources

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-covid-cold-chain-how-a-va....

https://www.pfizer.com/news/hot-topics/covid_19_vaccine_u_s_distribution...

https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moder...

Would you rather wait another four months without any vaccine?

The agency is granting emergency clearance based on two months of safety follow-up after trial participants received the last shot in a two-dose regimen. Full approval requires six months.

One of the reasons the stage 3 trials went so quick, is the number of people willing to enter the trial. Stage 4 trials would likely prove difficult as vaccines become more available and people drop out of trials if they think they’re getting a placebo.

To counter this, other U.S. programs will be tracking potential adverse effects in the public that weren’t seen in the clinical trials.

1. CDC: V-safe — A new smartphone-based, after-vaccination health checker for people who receive COVID-19 vaccines. V-safe uses text messaging and web surveys from CDC to check in with vaccine recipients following COVID-19 vaccination. V-safe also provides second vaccine dose reminders if needed, and telephone follow up to anyone who reports medically significant (important) adverse events.
2. CDC: National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) — An acute and long-term care facility monitoring system with reporting to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System or VAERS that will allow for determination of COVID-19 vaccine adverse event reporting rates.
3. FDA: Other large insurer/payer databases — A system of administrative and claims-based data for surveillance and research.

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Phase 1: This phase typically consists of 50 to 100 healthy volunteers. During phase 1, researchers assess the drug’s safety, determine the side effects, and evaluate how the drug should be taken.

Phase 2: Typically, 100 to 300 patients with the condition for which the medicine, device, product, or treatment has been developed participate in this next phase. Researchers look to assess the short-term safety and effectiveness of the drug, find the dose at which it works best with the least side effects, and conduct a small-scale placebo comparison.

Phase 3: In phase 3, the pool of volunteers must be must larger. Typically, between several hundred and several thousand patients participate, so researchers can confirm the drug’s safety and effectiveness and compare the new drug to other compounds (e.g., a placebo or other therapies). There are no other vaccines for Covid so they tested it against placebo and tracked the number of people infected and the severity of illness. Over 43,000 were in the Pfzier trial. Over 30,000 were in the Moderna. Normally a phase 3 trial has 300 to 3,000 participants...

Following the completion of Phase 3, a drug is approved (or not approved) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use by specific patients. Phase 4 may only begin if the drug is approved.

Phase 4: Finally, after the drug is approved researchers look to study the effectiveness of the drug in a wide variety of patients as well as monitor the safety in a large group and enable the development of new uses for the compound. These studies often involve thousands of patients and can inform future research and development. It's goal is post marketing surveillance in the general public. Phase IV clinical trials happen after the FDA has approved medication. This phase involves thousands of participants and can last for many years.
Covid has not been around years.