The company said it is reaching a critical milestone in its vaccination program (performance)
A vaccine jointly developed by Pfizer and BioNTech was 90% effective in preventing Covid-19 infections in ongoing Phase 3 trials, the companies said on Monday.
The statement was released as coronavirus cases skyrocket around the world and European stock markets and oil prices surged on the news.
According to preliminary results, patient protection was achieved seven days after the second of the two doses and 28 days after the first.
“The first set of results from our Phase 3 Covid-19 vaccine trial provides initial evidence of our vaccine’s ability to prevent Covid-19,” Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement. communicated.
“We are an important step towards providing people around the world with a much needed breakthrough to help end this global health crisis,” he said.
“We are reaching this critical milestone in our vaccine development program at a time when the world needs it most.
In much of the world, rates of Covid-19 infections are reaching record highs, hospital intensive care units filling up and the death toll rising.
Based on supply projections, the companies said they plan to deliver up to 50 million doses of vaccine globally in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.
U.S. biotech company Moderna, several state-run Chinese labs and a European project led by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca are believed to be getting closer to potentially viable vaccines.
Two Russian Covid-19 vaccines were registered for us even before clinical trials were completed, but were not widely accepted outside of Russia.
The Phase 3 clinical trial – the last step – of the new vaccine, BNT162b2, began in late July and has enrolled 43,538 participants to date, 90% of whom have received a second dose of the candidate vaccine as of November 8.
Pfizer said it was gathering two months of safety data after the final dose – a requirement of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration – to qualify for emergency use authorization, which it is waiting for. for the third week of November.
“We look forward to sharing additional efficacy and safety data generated by thousands of participants in the coming weeks,” Bourla said.
– Dozens of additional candidates –
The so-called messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccine is a new approach to protection against viral infection.
Unlike traditional vaccines, which work by training the body to recognize and kill proteins produced by pathogens, mRNA tricks the patient’s immune system into producing viral proteins on its own.
The proteins are harmless, but sufficient to elicit a robust immune response.
The study will also assess the potential of the vaccine candidate to provide protection against COVID-19 in those who have previously been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, as well as vaccine prevention against serious illness of COVID-19.
Pfizer and BioNTech plan to submit data from the full Phase 3 trial for scientific peer review.
In mid-October, the World Health Organization (WHO) identified 42 “candidate vaccines” in clinical trials, up from 11 in mid-June.
Ten of them were in the most advanced phase of phase 3, during which the effectiveness of a vaccine is tested on a large scale, usually tens of thousands of people on several continents.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
