A COVID-19 vaccine may be on the way.
Albert Bourla, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals’ CEO, claims that a vaccine under development to protect people from COVID-19 could be 90% effective, CNN reports.
“What we know right now, it is with a very, very high level of confidence, [is that] these are very highly effective vaccines,” Bourla told Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN‘s chief medical correspondent. “…we don’t have any safety concerns, but we need to wait until the results are there.”
A placebo group and a group that received two rounds of the vaccine were entered in a trial to test the efficacy rate of the potential treatment. An independent research committee looked at the data from the trials for 3 hours and determined that protection against the virus was attained just 28 days after the second dose.
The vaccine uses mRNA, a never-before-approved technology that uses genetic material to trick cells into producing a protein that emulates the virus. Despite predictions from the FDA that any coronavirus vaccine would be no more than 50% effective, Pfizer is pushing its new findings as the leading data in the race to find a cure.
Bourla says Pfizer partnered with the German company BioNTech to develop the immunization shot and that it could be “the greatest medical advance in the last 100 years.” He also believes that Pfizer expects to have 50 million vaccine doses globally by the end of the year and that it “will be free to all American citizens.”
In the meantime, we should all continue to practice social distancing and wear masks.