Moderna – which has been around less than 10 years and ‘somehow’ convinced the government to mandate their mRNA jabs for hundreds of millions of Americans to participate in normal life during the pandemic – announced this week that its vaccine for birth defects did not perform well in a clinical trial, so they’re scrapping it.
The company’s mRNA vaccine for cytomegalovirus (CMV) did not meet the primary efficacy endpoint in preventing CMV infection in healthy females of childbearing age (16-40) in a phase 3 randomized trial involving around 7,500 women.
Pregnant mothers can pass CMV to their babies – with about 1 in every 200 born with CMV and around 20% of babies who contract it suffering from birth defects or long term health problems, including hearing loss.
As the Epoch Times notes further, Moderna’s CMV vaccine utilizes messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology, just like its only approved shots, which target COVID-19.
Moderna executives said in January that the trial for the CMV vaccine, mRNA-1647, needed to keep going because interim results did not show enough efficacy, but expressed optimism that the shot would ultimately be successful, noting it could be the first such vaccine on the market because no others exist as of yet.
The efficacy of the shot turned out to be between 6 percent and 23 percent, depending on the case definition.
“We are clearly disappointed by the failure to prevent primary infection because it means there is still no vaccine for the prevention of congenital CMV despite the many decades of work by the field,” Dr. Stephen Hoge, Moderna’s president, said in a statement.
The company has decided to discontinue its CMV program.
Moderna said that the vaccine was “generally well-tolerated … with a safety profile consistent with earlier studies.” It will continue studying mRNA-1647 in bone marrow transplant patients.
“CMV does cause significant disease in other contexts, including reactivation of the latent virus in those undergoing bone marrow transplantation, and we will continue to explore the potential of mRNA-1647 to suppress disease associated with reactivation in those high-risk patients through our ongoing Phase 2 study,” Hoge said.
That study started in 2023 and is scheduled to be completed in 2026. About 224 people were set to receive the vaccine or placebo after ceasing prophylactic treatment for CMV, including the drug letermovir.
Moderna said its 2025 financial outbreak is not expected to be impacted by the trial failure.
“Moderna anticipated minimal initial revenue contribution from mRNA-1647 given necessary investments in market building and launch,” it stated.
Moderna still expects to break even in 2028.
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