Pfizer says COVID vaccine 95% effective in final trials

The coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer has shown 95 per cent efficacy in the late-stage trial, the company said on Wednesday. The US drugmaker and partner BioNTech SE said their vaccine protected people of all ages and ethnicities, with no significant safety problems so far in a trial that includes almost 44,000 participants. Efficacy in adults over 65 years, who are at particular risk from the virus, was over 94 per cent.The pharmaceutical giant said that it plans to apply for emergency US authorisation within days.

The only severe adverse event that affected more than 2 per cent of those vaccinated was fatigue, which affected 3.7 per cent of recipients after the second dose. Older adults tended to report fewer and milder solicited adverse events following vaccination. With hundreds of thousands of people around the globe infected every day, we urgently need to get a safe and effective vaccine to the world," Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement. Pfizer reiterated it expects to make as many as 50 million vaccine doses this year, enough to protect 25 million people, and then produce up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.

Both the Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are based on messenger RNA, a new type of vaccine technology that is able to be deployed very quickly. It essentially transforms the body’s cells into tiny vaccine making machines. The vaccines instruct cells to make copies of the coronavirus spike protein, stimulating the production of protective antibodies.      Of the dozens of drugmakers and research groups racing to develop vaccines against Covid-19, the next data release will likely be from AstraZeneca Plc with the University of Oxford in November or December. Johnson & Johnson says it is on track to deliver data this year.