COVID-19 Vaccine: Pfizer Makes Significant Progress
Pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, has announced that it has created a coronavirus vaccine that is 90 percent effective. According to the drug company, the early analysis showed its new Covid-19 vaccine is more than 90 percent effective in preventing infection.
The news announced Monday, November 9, by Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech SE, comes as a welcome development to mankind as the disease has killed 1.26 million people worldwide and almost 240,000 people in the U.S. alone.
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“Today is a great day for science and humanity,”
Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.
“We are reaching this critical milestone in our vaccine development program at a time when the world needs it most with infection rates setting new records, hospitals nearing over-capacity and economies struggling to reopen.”
In today’s announcement, Pfizer said it’s study showed that people who received two doses as part of the trial saw 90 percent fewer symptomatic cases of Covid-19 than participants who were given a placebo.
According to Pfizer, it would not apply to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization until it had two months worth of safety data, which will likely not come until the third week of November.
Pfizer added that based on current projections it expects to produce globally up to 50 million vaccine doses in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.