Moderna vaccine: US starts to ship its second approved jab against coronavirus

By Mark Armstrong with AFP

Published on 20/12/2020 - 20:45

In the US workers have been busy packaging and distributing the Moderna vaccine, the second one to be approved by authorities

In the United States work has started on the packaging and distributing the second COVID-19 vaccine to be authorised by the country's health authorities.

The Moderna vaccine, developed in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health, is desperately needed to boost efforts to control the coronavirus pandemic raging across the USA.

Doctors will start giving people the much-needed jab on Monday, just three days after the Food and Drug Administration authorised their emergency rollout.

Since the FDA granted the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine emergency approval a week ago, around 2.9 million doses have been delivered, according to management of the "Warp Speed" operation, the organisation set up by the US government to develop and distribute anti-COVID-19 vaccines.

So far COVID-19 has killed over 300,000 people in the United States, the worst affected country in the world with over 18 million infections to date.

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