“Do we know that, just thinking ethically, is it okay to give people another experimental injection? Are we sure it’s going to be safe and effective? Are we just rolling these out because we want to roll them out for money?” asked Leslie.
Gill responds by acknowledging the real-time nature of the data being collected and the historical challenges faced by mRNA vaccines, which had never previously reached clinical trials due to side effects.
“This is real-time data that we are generating. We don’t even know when we started vaccinating people. We had no idea how it’s going to look like,” said Gill.
“MRNA vaccines have been there for 50 years, but nothing made to clinical. Why? Because mRNA vaccines have been known to have side effects,” she added.
“Moderna has been working on it for ten years. This is not a new thing. But why it did not reach trial was because of all these side effects. Pfizer and Moderna used the emergency and the pandemic to kind of get through it now. But even the CDC model never gets FDA,” Gill admitted.