The World Health Organization on Friday listed the anti-Covid-19 Moderna vaccine for emergency use.
The listing procedure helps the countries unable to assess a vaccine’s effectiveness themselves would have access as quickly as possible and allows the Covax vaccine sharing scheme and other partners to distribute it to poorer countries.
This US vaccine is the fifth jab in the list to earn WHO’s emergency listing.
The other vaccines on the list for emergency use by WHO are Pfizer BioNTech; AstraZeneca; Serum Institute of India; and Janssen.
The US Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for the Moderna vaccine on 18 December 2020 and a marketing authorization valid throughout the European Union was granted by the European Medicines Agency on 6 January 2021.
WHO in a statement said that the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) had found that the Moderna vaccine has an efficacy of 94.1 percent.
Moderna on Thursday said it expected to produce up to three billion doses of its vaccine in 2022 through new funding commitments to boost supply at manufacturing sites in Europe and the US.
