Pfizer announced Wednesday morning that it would seek approval for its COVID vaccine within days after a final analysis showed better results than those reported last week.
NBC News reports: “The U.S. pharma giant and its German partner said their Phase 3 trial was now complete, and that it found the vaccine was 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic Covid-19 — up from the 90 percent announced last week. There have been no serious side effects among the 41,135 adults who received two doses, the companies said in a joint statement. The most common reactions were that 3.7 percent of participants experiencing fatigue and 2 percent had a headache, it said.”
“Their vaccine has been tested on 43,500 people in six countries and no safety concerns have been raised,” BBC reported last week. “There are around a dozen in the final stages of testing – known as a phase 3 trial – but this is the first to show any results. It uses a completely experimental approach – that involves injecting part of the virus’s genetic code – in order to train the immune system. Previous trials have shown the vaccine trains the body to make both antibodies – and another part of the immune system called T-cells to fight the coronavirus. Two doses, three weeks apart, are needed. The trials – in US, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa and Turkey – show 90% protection is achieved seven days after the second dose.”
Bloomberg reported last week: “Eight months into the worst pandemic in a century, the preliminary results pave the way for the companies to seek an emergency-use authorization from regulators if further research shows the shot is also safe. … The data do have limits. For now, few details on the vaccine’s efficacy are available. It isn’t known how well the shot works in key subgroups, such as the elderly. Thoseanalyses haven’t been conducted. And it isn’t known whether the vaccine prevents severe disease, as none of the participants who got Covid-19 in this round of analysis had severe cases, Gruber said.”
