Two doctors at the University of California, San Francisco are one of those who expressed excitement with the early results showing that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine could be 90% effective.
“My first words were’wow’,” Dr. George Rutherford, Head of Infectious Diseases and World Epidemiology at UCSF, told KCBS Radio. “90% efficacy is amazing. The measles vaccine we use as the best vaccine ever is 95%. If they can sustain it, this will be a real home run. . “
Dr. Bob Wahater, a UCSF coronavirus expert, expressed similar excitement. “90% effectiveness is far superior to most optimistic predictions. Election analogy: these are the result of CA, not PA,” Wachter said. I have written In one of his regular Twitter threads covering the pandemic.
However, if the vaccine is approved and distributed by a reliable process, “I think the intake will be around 70-80%,” he added.
Wachter also warned that while the news was encouraging, people still needed to wear masks and obey health orders.
“While properly excited about vaccines, it’s worth remembering that it probably won’t make a significant difference in everyone’s life / school / economy until next summer,” Wachter said. I have written.. “If so, that means that the time from now to that time is equal to the time since the first COVID case in the United States.”
Why is it so long?
Wachter said the next big step is to consider safety, and the reason why vaccines aren’t considered an emergency license by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration until later this month is for researchers to observe at least half. Volunteers said it was because they had to wait two months.
He hoped the vaccine would not raise safety concerns, and noted that the other three vaccine trials were “interrupted at various times to analyze safety concerns.” Pfizer’s research was uninterrupted, so it is unlikely that it will be high enough. ”The number of serious side effects that upset approval. “
So when is the vaccine actually ready?
“Pfizer says it will have 50 million doses available by the end of the year and 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021,” Wachter wrote. “This is a two-dose vaccine, which means that by January, 25 million people who are not in the United States will have enough vaccine.”
He said deploying the vaccine is not an easy task as all doses need to be packaged, frozen, shipped and tracked.
“This means that under ideal circumstances, most of the vaccinated population will not be seen until spring or summer (of course, other vaccines will work as well, which can shorten the timeline. There is sex), ”Wachter wrote. “This means that we still have so many COVIDs in front of us and there are dead people. Stay safe!”
Read Wachter’s complete thread on Pfizer vaccines here.
