CureVac COVID-19 shows 48% efficacy in clinical trials

June 30 (UPI) -- German company CureVac announced Wednesday that its COVID-19 vaccine showed 48% efficacy in clinical trials.

In a statement Wednesday, the company said its two-dose vaccine regimen, which uses messenger RNA technology, was 48% effective at preventing people from becoming ill with at least one symptom.

The mark is below the 50% efficacy mark required by some regulators and other mRNA vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, which each showed about 95% efficacy in clinical trials.

CureVac noted that the vaccine showed greater effectiveness in subjects aged 18 to 60 with 53% efficacy against disease of any severity across all 15 identified strains of the virus, along with 77% protection against moderate to severe disease and 100% protection against hospitalization or death.

The company added that, unlike previously approved vaccines, its vaccine trials were conducted in the presence of variants.

Of the 40,000 people who participated in the trial, 228 contracted COVID-19 but only 3% of those were attributable to the original strain of COVID-19.

"In the current context of an increasingly diverse environment of COVID-19 variants, and with very little residual prevalence of the original strain, we are confident that the HERALD study offers clinically relevant data regarding the effect of emerging variants on vaccine efficacy," said CureVac.