First data for Moderna Covid-19 vaccine show it spurs an immune response

The first published data from an early-stage trial of Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine show that it led patients to produce neutralizing antibodies, but many experienced minor side effects. Patients who were given the vaccine — called mRNA-1273 — made more antibodies to neutralize SARS-CoV-2 than patients who have recovered from Covid-19, the data show. But the big questions of whether these antibodies will protect against future infection and for how long still remain. Moderna announced that it will be initiating a 30,000-person Phase 3 trial later this month to continue testing its vaccine. Read more from STAT's Matthew Herper and Damian Garde here.

Here's what else is new with the pandemic:

New instructions posted in an obscure HHS document this week are asking hospitals to bypass submitting their Covid-19 data to the CDC and instead to a central database in Washington, according to the New York Times. HHS — and not the CDC — will collect information on hospital beds, ventilator availability and other statistics, a move that government officials shared would streamline data collection. But critics are worried that this central repository could leave the data vulnerable to being manipulated for political gain.
“If we could get everybody to wear a mask right now, I really think in the next four, six, eight weeks, we could bring this epidemic under control,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said during a live webcast yesterday, underscoring the importance of face coverings. His comments accompanied an editorial yesterday in which he and agency colleagues urged universal masking, and a CDC report of a Missouri salon where two stylists who turned out to have Covid-19 didn't infect nearly 140 patrons because all wore masks.
As physicians have increasingly abandoned the familiar stethoscope to examine Covid-19 patients in favor of point-of-care ultrasounds, the writer of a new First Opinion wonders if stethoscopes — which can be unreliable and transmit infection — will become a relic of the past.