If Pfizer’s vaccine is licensed, the number of doses will initially be limited.
Pfizer Inc said on Monday that its experimental COVID-19 vaccine was over 90% effective, a major victory in the fight against a pandemic that has killed more than a million people, damaged the global economy and disrupted the world. everyday life.
Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech SE are the first drugmakers to publish successful data from a large-scale clinical trial of a coronavirus vaccine. The companies said they had not found any serious safety concerns so far and expected to seek US clearance this month for emergency use of the vaccine.
Health experts said Pfizer’s results were positive for all COVID-19 vaccines currently in development because they show the injections are aimed at the right target and are proof of concept that the disease can be stopped by vaccination.
“Today is a great day for science and humanity,” said Albert Bourla, Chairman and CEO of Pfizer.
“We are reaching this crucial milestone in our vaccine development agenda at a time when the world needs it most, with infection rates setting new records, hospitals near overcapacity and economies struggling to reopen.
If Pfizer’s vaccine is licensed, the number of doses will initially be limited and many questions remain, including how long the vaccine will provide protection.
BioNTech chief executive Ugur Sahin told Reuters he was optimistic that the vaccine’s vaccination effect would last for a year, although it was not yet certain.
“This news made me smile from ear to ear. It is a relief to see such positive results on this vaccine and bodes well for COVID-19 vaccines in general,” said Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the University of Oxford.
OVERVIEW OF MARKETS
The prospect of a vaccine has electrified global markets, with S&P 500 futures hitting record highs and tourism and travel shares rising. Shares of companies that have benefited from lockdowns linked to the pandemic fell, including the Zoom Video Communications conferencing platform, which was down 12% in pre-market trading.
Pfizer shares were quoted 14.2% higher in pre-market trading in New York, while BioNTech shares rose nearly 23% in Frankfurt.
“The light at the end of the tunnel. Let’s just hope the vaccine deniers don’t get in the way, but 2021 has just been a lot brighter,” said Neil Wilson, chief market analyst at Markets.com
Shares of other vaccine developers in the final stage of testing were also up, with Johnson & Johnson growing 4% in pre-market and Moderna 7.4% stronger. The British AstraZeneca lost 0.5%.
“The efficacy data is really impressive. It’s better than most of us expected,” said William Schaffner, infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee. “The study is not yet complete, but the data nonetheless looks very strong.”
US President Donald Trump praised the results of the tests and the market revival: “THE STOCK MARKET IS INCREASING, THE VACCINE TO COME. 90% EFFICIENT REPORT. SUCH GREAT NEWS! he said on Twitter.
President-elect Joe Biden said the news was great, but didn’t change the fact that face masks, social distancing and other health measures would be needed well into next year.
1.3 BILLION DOSES
Pfizer plans to seek broad US clearance for emergency use of the vaccine in people between the ages of 16 and 85. To do so, it will need two months of safety data from about half of the 44,000 study participants, which is expected by the end of this month.
“I’m almost ecstatic,” Bill Gruber, one of Pfizer’s top vaccine researchers, said in an interview. “This is a great day for public health and for the potential to pull us all out of the circumstances we are in now.”
Pfizer and BioNTech have entered into a $ 1.95 billion contract with the U.S. government to deliver 100 million doses of vaccine starting this year. They also have supply agreements with the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan.
To save time, companies started making the vaccine before they knew if it would be effective. They now plan to produce up to 50 million doses, enough to protect 25 million people this year.
Pfizer said it plans to produce up to 1.3 billion doses of the vaccine in 2021.
The U.S. pharmaceutical giant said the interim analysis was conducted after 94 trial participants developed COVID-19, looking at how many of them received the vaccine compared to a placebo.
The company did not say how many people who fell ill received the vaccine. Yet an effectiveness of over 90% implies that no more than 8 of the 94 people who caught COVID-19 had received the vaccine, which was given as two injections about three weeks apart.
The efficacy rate is well above the 50% efficacy required by the United States Food and Drug Administration for a vaccine against the coronavirus.
MORE DATA NEEDED
To confirm the rate of effectiveness, Pfizer said it would continue the trial until there are 164 cases of COVID-19 among the participants. Bourla told CNBC on Monday that due to rising infection rates, the trial could be completed before the end of November.
The data has not yet been peer reviewed or published in a medical journal. Pfizer said it would do so once it had the results of the entire trial.
“These are interesting first signals, but again, they are only communicated in press releases,” said Marylyn Addo, head of tropical medicine at Hamburg-Eppendorf University Medical Center in Germany.
“Primary data is not yet available and a peer-reviewed publication is still pending. We still have to wait for the exact data before we can do a final assessment.”
The global vaccine race has seen richer countries strike multi-billion dollar supply deals with drugmakers like Pfizer, AstraZeneca Plc, and Johnson & Johnson, raising questions about when middle-income countries and poorer countries will have access to vaccines.
The US quest for a vaccine has been the Trump administration’s central response to the pandemic. The United States has the highest known number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the world with more than 10 million infections and more than 237,000 deaths.
Trump has repeatedly assured the public that his administration will likely identify an effective vaccine in time for the presidential election, held last Tuesday. Democratic rival Biden was declared the winner on Saturday.
ESSENTIAL TOOLS
Vaccines are seen as essential tools to help end the health crisis that has closed businesses and left millions of people out of work. Millions of children whose schools were closed in March remain in distance learning programs.
Dozens of drugmakers and research groups around the world have rushed to develop COVID-19 vaccines, which topped 50 million infections on Sunday since the novel coronavirus emerged at the end of the year. last year in China.
The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine uses messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, which relies on synthetic genes that can be generated and made in weeks, and produced on a large scale faster than conventional vaccines.
Moderna Inc, whose vaccine candidate uses similar technology, is expected to release the results of its large-scale trial later this month.
MRNA technology is designed to trigger an immune response without the use of pathogens, such as real viral particles.
Pfizer on its own will not have the capacity to immediately deliver enough vaccine to the United States. The Trump administration has said it will have sufficient supplies for all 330 million U.S. residents who want to be vaccinated by mid-2021.
The U.S. government has said vaccines will be provided free to Americans, including the insured, the uninsured, and those in government health programs such as Medicare.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
