Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Here's what I found for Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Yasir Batalvi is a 24-year-old political strategist.

In mid-October, he drove to the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts

and got his first shot of either a COVID-19 vaccine or a placebo.

I felt so helpless. I mean, this pandemic really has affected everybody's lives so significantly.

Yasir is a participant in Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine trial.

He signed up for the trial in July and got the call to come in a few months later.

It was what I had to do. It felt like a civic duty.

I mean, I got the call and I was like, it's public service.

I have to do it because I think mass-scale vaccination is really the only realistic way out of the pandemic that we're in.

Thanks to the hard work of scientists and also the courage of tens of thousands of volunteers like Yasir,

we are getting closer to a COVID-19 vaccine.

As you probably know by now, two companies, Moderna and Pfizer have already applied for emergency use authorizations for their vaccines.

And in the coming weeks, the Food and Drug Administration will make a decision in each case.

The companies are preparing to ship millions of doses of their vaccines as soon as they are authorized.

And that means that pretty soon, some of us could be getting the real deal.

Now both Pfizer and Moderna's candidates use mRNA technology.

That's never been used before in an FDA approved vaccine.

And that has some people nervous.

So today I asked Yasir to walk us through what it was like to get an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine

and also help answer some of the questions on many people's minds.

...