BREAKING: US COVID-19 Vaccine Suggests Over 90% Effectiveness

On November 9, US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German biotech company BioNTech announced test results for the COVID-19 vaccine that they have been working on. And surprisingly, the results suggest that the vaccine is more than 90% effective.

Before the results came out, scientists and researchers had only hoped for a vaccine to be 75% effective while White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said that a vaccine only needed to have an efficiency of about 50 to 60% to be approved.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic that has taken away the lives of over 1.25 million people worldwide, Dr. Albert Bourla, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Albert Bourla, expressed her enthusiasm and optimism about the COVID-19 vaccine.

Right after the news came out, the US stock market immediately rallied. While the S&P 500 achieved 1.2%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained over 800 points. Pfizer stock saw an increase of over 8.2%.

The new test results of the COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech are based on the first analysis conducted by the Data Monitoring Committee from a third-phase clinical trial.

An independent team of experts oversees US clinical trials to ensure the safety of the volunteers participating.

With the COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech, researchers analyzed and evaluated 94 cases of COVID-19 patients among 43,538 participants. The difference between those vaccinated and those only receive placebo suggested the effectiveness of the vaccine to be over 90% after 7 days after the second injection.

However, the final percentage is likely to change as additional data is still being collected.

Pfizer and BioNTech report that around 42% of their participants are from different races and ethnicities. There is no data showing that the vaccine can cause a dangerous complication.

The two companies said that they planned to submit an emergency vaccine license to the US Food and Drug Administration (CDC). Based on current forecasts, Pfizer and BioNTech are expected to manufacture up to 50 million doses of vaccine by 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses by 2021.

US officials and scientists hope that the US will have a COVID-19 vaccine in the first half of 2021, about 12 to 18 months since Chinese scientists first identified and mapped the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

If this goal is achieved, it will be a record time for a vaccine to be successfully developed. The fastest development of a vaccine is for mumps that took scientists just over four years to research, test, and license it back in 1967.

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