Pfizer: COVID vaccine is 95% effective

Drugmaker Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech said Wednesday they would be submitting their coronavirus vaccine candidate for regulatory approval “within days” after their final analysis revealed the treatment was 95% effective with no major side effects.

The drug’s Phase 3 trial, now complete, confirmed the vaccine was consistently effective across “age, gender, race and ethnicity demographics,” the company said in a statement. It comes just one week after initial trial results suggested the vaccine was more than 90% effective, and two days after pharmaceutical rival Moderna said preliminary trial data indicated its vaccine was about 94.5% effective.

Pfizer enrolled nearly 44,000 people across the U.S. and five other countries in its study, 170 of whom have come down with coronavirus since clinical trials of the two-dose treatment kicked off in July. Just eight of those positive cases received the vaccine, while the other 162 got the placebo, indicating an efficacy rate of about 95%.

Experts noted the treatment induces a “high rate of protection” within about 28 days of the second shot. It’s still unknown what level of immunity it yields or how long the immunity lasts after a patient receives the vaccines.

Of the 41,135 adult volunteers that have received the treatment so far, none have exhibited any serious side effects, though several have reported some minor reactions to the treatment.

Nearly 4% of volunteers said they’d been experiencing fatigue while another 2% reported headaches after the second shot, according to Pfizer.

The drugmaker also announced it has collected enough safety data to seek out emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, a process that could still take several weeks.

“The study results mark an important step in this historic eightmonth journey to bring forward a vaccine capable of helping to end this devastating pandemic,” said Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.

Pfizer and BioNTech said they plan to produce up to 50 million vaccine doses globally in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.

U.S. officials have said they hope to have about 20 million vaccine doses each from Moderna and Pfizer available in late December, with the first wave of shots distributed to vulnerable groups such as medical and nursing home workers, and people with serious health conditions.