ince the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved emergency use of COVID-19 vaccines, many people have wondered whether one vaccine is better than the other.
Now, the first head-to-head comparison of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines has been released.
Researchers from the Department of Veterans Affairs, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital teamed up to analyze electronic health records of nearly 220,000 veterans who received two doses of the Moderna vaccine and about 220,000 veterans who received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
“We knew from early randomized trials that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were both remarkably effective at preventing symptomatic disease. We also knew that detecting any subtle differences between their effectiveness would require a head-to-head comparison in a very large sample — much larger than would be practical in a randomized trial,” Dr. Barbra A. Dickerman, first author of the study,
Effectiveness of the vaccines was measured based on:
documented, or asymptomatic, infection
symptomatic infection
hospitalization
ICU admission
death
The results show that both vaccines are significantly effective.