Pfizer Now Says Coronavirus Vaccine is 95% Effective and Has Passed Safety Checks

The race is on for a coronavirus vaccine to hit the market as cases continue to surge.

Pharma giant Pfizer, who is partnering with vaccine-developer BioNTech (BNTX), announced this week that their vaccine in trials appears to protect 94% of people over 65-years-old.

Data indicated that their mRNA vaccine works equally well across all ethnicities and races of people.

Pfizer also said there had been “no serious safety concerns” reported. Just 2% of the 43,000 people testing the vaccine said they had experienced a headache, and 3.7% had reported fatigue.

It was earlier this month that the companies had announced preliminary success with their vaccine and said that it had proved to be around 90% effective.

The final efficacy analysis shows that the vaccine protected 95% of trial participants within four weeks of receiving the first dose. The vaccine is administered in two doses.

“The study results mark an important step in this historic eight-month journey to bring forward a vaccine capable of helping to end this devastating pandemic. We continue to move at the speed of science to compile all the data collected thus far and share with regulators around the world,” said Dr Albert Bourla, Pfizer chairman and CEO.

“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.”

“We are grateful that the first global trial to reach the final efficacy analysis mark indicates that a high rate of protection against COVID-19 can be achieved very fast after the first 30 µg dose, underscoring the power of BNT162 in providing early protection,” said Ugur Sahin, MD, CEO and co-founder of BioNTech.

“These achievements highlight the potential of mRNA as a new drug class. Our objective from the very beginning was to design and develop a vaccine that would generate rapid and potent protection against COVID-19 with a benign tolerability profile across all ages.

“We believe we have achieved this with our vaccine candidate BNT162b2 in all age groups studied so far and look forward to sharing further details with the regulatory authorities. I want to thank all the devoted women and men who contributed to this historically unprecedented achievement.”

The companies are submitting their data on a “rolling” basis to the European regulator, the EMA.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.