Maybe this is my celebratory shirt! Pfizer just released their interim analysis showing that their vaccine is 90% effective against COVID-19!
I’m Dr. Jeff Kingsley, welcome to an edition of Riding in Cars with Researchers. So what is this announcement mean? Interim analysis means early, not a lot of patients, not as many patients that would be necessary for statistically significant proof that something works. The more patients you have in a clinical research trial, the more accurate the information is. So the interim analysis is on a smaller number of patients, but this interim analysis showed a 90% efficacy. This means of the patients who got Pfizer’s vaccine candidate (and the patients who didn’t) many, many more patients who didn’t get the vaccine got COVID-19 than the patients who got the vaccine.
This means the vaccine protected the patients who got it to the tune of 90% – 9 out of 10 patients who got the vaccine were immune to contracting COVID-19. Not only did they have antibodies, but they literally didn’t get it at the same rate as the people who didn’t get Pfizer’s vaccine candidate. That’s huge!
And so Pfizer’s announcement just came out: Pfizer will be applying for an FDA emergency use authorization probably within the next week. And I find it highly likely that Pfizer will get that. They’ve also announced that the patients who were in their trial who got on placebo (who didn’t get the vaccine) will have an option to now guarantee that they get the vaccine and they can stay in the trial and continue to provide us with data on how long did they maintain immunity and the safety profile. But Pfizer has promised that from the start. So super cool results. This is the first time that this has happened in the COVID pandemic. We have interim analysis showing a really, really great amount of success in safety and efficacy. 90% is much higher than the bar that had been set.
So this is really exciting stuff. Anyway, just wanted to share it and get that information out there. Super exciting work regarding vaccines for COVID-19 just coming out today.
Thanks for riding along!
Send me topics you want me to talk about at jeff.kingsley@centricityresearch.com!
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