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Originally Posted by blueash
You're not understanding at all what they are reporting. Pfizer is following a group of people, about 43,000, half of whom got two doses of vaccine and half got two doses of a placebo. Then they watch to see what happens. The only way to know if a vaccine works is to either deliberately expose the participants to the disease or to allow for community exposure. If there is not any disease in a community then you will never know if the vaccine works as there will be zero cases in both groups.
So Pfizer had to just follow their participants and wait until a pre-determined number of cases had been diagnosed. Then look to see if the vaccinated group got fewer cases than the un-protected group. This report today is that they have reached their first pre-determined report level and those who got the shots were 90% less likely to get Covid than those who got two placebo doses. That is very good but does not answer a lot of questions. Pfizer will continue to follow their groups and will be reporting more data on both protection and side effects.
The efficacy study will terminate when they have about 160 people actually get Covid and then they will look at the rates in each group. They will follow longer to evaluate long term protection and long term side effects. The protocol is HERE https://pfe-pfizercom-d8-prod.s3.ama...ol_Nov2020.pdf
An independent panel is doing the analysis and all will be subject to FDA review which hopefully will be rigorous and not subject to outside influence. There is a problem with this vaccine in that it has rather severe requirements for storage, shipping and handling which is not an issue for some of the other vaccines in testing. |
Thank you, Dr. blueash.
Pfizer’s CEO was quick to clarify that they were not a part of warp speed. This is not a rush job but it’s a start. Sounds like a really good start.
I read that Lipitor made them 100 billion between the time they patented it in 1997 and when the patent expired and it went generic. I thought they were the biggest pharmaceutical company in the world, but I just looked it up and it looks like the top spots move around a little — for now.