MANILA - The Philippines will have access to the coronavirus vaccine of the US, Malacañang said Tuesday, after a biotech firm in its Western ally announced that its drug against the COVID-19 disease was almost 95-percent effective.

The US' top infectious disease scientist on Monday hailed the coronavirus vaccine of Moderna as "stunningly impressive", following a clinical trial with more than 30,000 participants. Last week, American pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech also said their vaccine was 90 percent effective.

"We have firm commitments from the United States... that we will have access po to COVID vaccines that may be developed in the United States," said Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque.

He said US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo relayed this information to Manila's Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin.

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China has promised to supply its future COVID-19 vaccine to the Philippines, while the UK agreed with the World Health Organization that it would give its potential vaccine to poor countries, said Roque.

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Both US vaccine frontrunners are based on new technology that uses synthetic versions of molecules called "messenger RNA" to hack into human cells, and effectively turn them into vaccine-making factories.

"The idea that we have a 94.5 percent effective vaccine is stunningly impressive," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, which co-developed the vaccine.

"It is really a spectacular result that I don't think anybody had anticipated would be this good."

Moderna plans to submit applications for emergency approval around the world within weeks, and says it expects to have approximately 20 million doses ready to ship in the US by the end of the year.

The company, which has received $2 billion from the US government under "Operation Warp Speed," added it is on track to manufacture between 500 million to a billion doses globally in 2021.

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Global infections from COVID-19 have soared past 54 million with more than 1.3 million deaths since the virus emerged in China late last year.

Moncef Slaoui, who leads Operation Warp Speed, said he hoped the 2 vaccines would be approved "somewhere towards in the first half of December," with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine the next on the horizon early next year.

It is not yet clear how long-lasting the protection will be from either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines. Another open question is whether they stop people who are exposed to the virus from transmitting it on to the other people, even though they may be themselves protected from the disease.

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© With a report from Agence France-Presse