Hello, this is Dan McCollum with EM Basic. Today I'm joined by Michael Stevens. We're going to be chatting a little bit about the safety as well as efficacy of the recent COVID-19 vaccines. Welcome, Michael.

Hey, thanks for having me. So there's been a lot of misinformation out there, and that's why we're trying to rush this podcast out so that we can talk about how effective these vaccines are, as well as the fact that

they're really quite safe despite the fact they've had a relatively short production time.

So Dan, what are the two approved vaccines right now?

Great question. So in the United States right now, there's two current COVID-19 vaccines

that are approved, both of which are mRNA-based vaccines. We'll talk about that a little bit more

in a second. The first is the Pfizer-Slas Biointech. This was the first one that was approved,

and just for simplicity, we're going to call it the Pfizer vaccine, because Biointech's really

annoying to pronounce. The second one is going to be the Moderna vaccine. That one was approved

shortly thereafter.

These two vaccines are very, very similar in both their side effects as well as efficacy,

and they have that same backbone of being MRNA.

And certainly these weren't the only two companies vying for the money behind these vaccines.

Are there others in process?

Absolutely. So the big other one that's actually got great data is the

Oxford slash AstraZeneca vaccine. This has been approved in the United Kingdom as well as quite a few

other countries as well. And there's decent data that it works, but we have a little bit less data.

Right now, that's not approved in the United States, but I wouldn't be surprised if we got

approval a little bit after this recording. And out of curiosity, was the U.S. the first to approve

a vaccine for COVID? Well, it's a little bit complicated because there's some unstudied

vaccines that are actually available in places like Russia. We have so little data that I'm not

really going to be chatting about those today.

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