Bombshell COVID Vaccine Announcement Made 6 Days After Election
Pfizer said Monday that an early peek at the data on its coronavirus vaccine suggests the shots may be a robust 90 percent effective at preventing COVID-19, putting the company on track to apply later this month for emergency-use approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
The announcement was a major piece of encouraging news in the battle against the scourge that has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide, including almost a quarter-million in the U.S. alone.
“We’re in a position potentially to be able to offer some hope,” Dr. Bill Gruber, Pfizer’s senior vice president of clinical development, told The Associated Press. “We’re very encouraged.”
Pharmaceutical companies and various countries are in a global race to develop a vaccine against the virus.
In May, President Donald Trump announced “Operation Warp Speed,” a public-private partnership aiming to develop a vaccine by the end of the year.
“That means big and it means fast — a massive scientific, industrial and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project,” Trump said at the time.
Monday’s announcement doesn’t mean a vaccine is imminent: This interim analysis, from an independent data monitoring board, looked at 94 infections recorded so far in a study that has enrolled nearly 44,000 people in the U.S. and five other countries. Some participants got the vaccine, others got dummy shots.
Pfizer Inc. did not provide any more details about those infections and cautioned that the initial protection rate might change by the time the study ends.
“We need to see the data, but this is extremely promising,” said Dr. Jesse Goodman of Georgetown University, former chief of the FDA’s vaccine division.
He ticked off many questions still to be answered, including how long the vaccine’s effects last and whether it protects older people as well as younger people.
If Pfizer’s vaccine ultimately pans out, “it’s going to be a while before this has a major impact at the population level,” Goodman said.
The interim results were “an interesting first signal,” but questions remain, said Marylyn Addo, head of the tropical medicine unit at UKE hospital in Hamburg, Germany.
Global markets exploded on the news from Pfizer. Major markets in Europe, where infections have soared, were up 5 percent. In the U.S., Dow futures also rose 5 percent and were up about 1,400 points just over two hours before the opening bell.
Trump, who had suggested during the presidential campaign that a vaccine could be ready by Election Day, celebrated the news Monday on Twitter, saying, “STOCK MARKET UP BIG, VACCINE COMING SOON. REPORT 90% EFFECTIVE. SUCH GREAT NEWS!”
STOCK MARKET UP BIG, VACCINE COMING SOON. REPORT 90% EFFECTIVE. SUCH GREAT NEWS!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 9, 2020
Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla talked about the effort on CNBC.
“I am very happy, but at the same time, sometimes I have tears in my eyes when I realize that this is the end of nine months, day-and-night work of so many people and how many people, billions, invested hopes on this,” he said.
Bourla added: “I never thought it would be 90 percent.”
Earlier this year, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, said he would be happy with a COVID-19 vaccine that was 60 percent effective.
The shots, made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, are among 10 possible vaccine candidates in late-stage testing around the world — four of them so far in huge studies in the U.S.
Another U.S. company, Moderna Inc., also has said it hopes to be able to file an application with the FDA later this month.
Volunteers in the final-stage studies, and the researchers, don’t know who received the real vaccine or a dummy shot. But a week after their second required dose, Pfizer’s study began counting the number who developed COVID-19 symptoms and were confirmed to have the coronavirus.
Because the study hasn’t ended, Gruber couldn’t say how many in each group had infections. But the math suggests that almost all the infections counted so far had to have occurred in people who got the dummy shots.
Pfizer doesn’t plan to stop its study until it records 164 infections among all the volunteers, a number that the FDA has agreed is enough to tell how well the vaccine is working. The agency has made clear that any vaccine must be at least 50 percent effective.
No participant so far has become severely ill, Gruber said.
He could not provide a breakdown of how many of the infections had occurred in older people, who are at the highest risk from COVID-19.
Participants were tested only if they developed symptoms, leaving unanswered whether vaccinated people could get infected but show no symptoms and unknowingly spread the virus.
FDA has told companies they must track half their participants for side effects for at least two months, the time period when problems typically crop up. Pfizer expects to reach that milestone later this month but said Monday no serious safety concerns have been reported.
Because the pandemic is still raging, manufacturers hope to seek permission from governments around the world for emergency use of their vaccines while additional testing continues — allowing them to get to market faster than normal but raising concerns about how much scientists will know about the shots.
The FDA’s scientific advisers last month said they worry that allowing emergency use of a COVID-19 vaccine could damage confidence in the shots and make it harder to ever find out how well they really work.
Those advisers said it’s critical these massive studies are allowed to run to completion.
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