" What’s important to me here is that mRNA vaccines are an incredible technology, and I believe based on available data that they are superior to other technologies that have been deployed for COVID-19 vaccination."
The preliminary data from two widely-separated doses of the J&J vaccine shows efficacy comparable to the Pfizer product, does it not? Who knows what the efficacy after a third year-later booster (as with Pfizer & Moderna) would do? I mean, it's doing essentially the same thing: introducing nucleic acids into human cells causing them to manufacture spike protein.
In the end my favoring mRNA vaccines here comes down to what it always comes down to--industrial scalability and agility. RNA synthesizers don't require bioreactors and as a result the whole process is less fiddly and subject to contamination and other quality problems. Yes, it's still fantastically technical and complicated, but we've seen how many difficulties manufacturing of biologic-derived vaccines has run into globally vs how many problems mRNA vaccines have run into. Multiple viral vector vaccines and protein subunit vaccines have had process or quality issues with scaling production; I cannot think of any similar examples for either of the mRNA vaccines despite billions of doses having been manufactured.
Technological superiority is not exclusively about clinical efficacy/effectiveness. That said, there are drawbacks that I'm sure come to mind immediately--temperature of storage not being the least of them. Needing freezers really limits where a product can be deployed, even if those freezers are only -20C instead of -80C. For those remote areas where there is no freezer or dry ice availability but ice packs are an option, other technologies will need to get used, no doubt.
Moderna disagrees with you. They assert that making mRNA vaccines is fantastically difficult, so there's no point in sharing their technology with non-US, non-Western European countries. </heavy irony>
Moderna has been, by far, the most profiteering of the COVID-19 vaccine companies. This is probably because they have no other marketed product and need the revenue in order to fund other development projects, but I don't know. I think they could be perhaps a little more generous, but I don't have access to their financials.
" What’s important to me here is that mRNA vaccines are an incredible technology, and I believe based on available data that they are superior to other technologies that have been deployed for COVID-19 vaccination."
The preliminary data from two widely-separated doses of the J&J vaccine shows efficacy comparable to the Pfizer product, does it not? Who knows what the efficacy after a third year-later booster (as with Pfizer & Moderna) would do? I mean, it's doing essentially the same thing: introducing nucleic acids into human cells causing them to manufacture spike protein.
In the end my favoring mRNA vaccines here comes down to what it always comes down to--industrial scalability and agility. RNA synthesizers don't require bioreactors and as a result the whole process is less fiddly and subject to contamination and other quality problems. Yes, it's still fantastically technical and complicated, but we've seen how many difficulties manufacturing of biologic-derived vaccines has run into globally vs how many problems mRNA vaccines have run into. Multiple viral vector vaccines and protein subunit vaccines have had process or quality issues with scaling production; I cannot think of any similar examples for either of the mRNA vaccines despite billions of doses having been manufactured.
Technological superiority is not exclusively about clinical efficacy/effectiveness. That said, there are drawbacks that I'm sure come to mind immediately--temperature of storage not being the least of them. Needing freezers really limits where a product can be deployed, even if those freezers are only -20C instead of -80C. For those remote areas where there is no freezer or dry ice availability but ice packs are an option, other technologies will need to get used, no doubt.
Moderna disagrees with you. They assert that making mRNA vaccines is fantastically difficult, so there's no point in sharing their technology with non-US, non-Western European countries. </heavy irony>
Moderna has been, by far, the most profiteering of the COVID-19 vaccine companies. This is probably because they have no other marketed product and need the revenue in order to fund other development projects, but I don't know. I think they could be perhaps a little more generous, but I don't have access to their financials.