Pfizer’s Covid-19 Vaccine
Worldwide, everybody is looking forward to a Covid-19 vaccine, since January 2020, there have been over 200 vaccine trials out of which only 15 trials have progressed into stage 3 clinical trials-human testing. Pfizer and BioNTech have been part of the race to find a potential Covid-19 vaccine and they are close to becoming approved as an emergency use drug in the US.
The big pharmaceutical company reached its target of 95% protection with human clinical trials last week targeted at all age groups and ethnicities, which is a massive achievement. This trial recruited 41,000 people around the globe where half were given the two-shot vaccine and half were given a placebo. Around 42% of individuals were from diverse ethnicities and 41% belonged to the older age category ( 56 to 85 years). The pharmaceutical company also highlighted that the potential vaccine was more effective in the older generation as 2% of healthy volunteers had minimal side effects such as headaches and fatigue when they were given a jab of the vaccine.
However, the potential vaccine is still a long way from regulatory approval as this drug uses experimental technology that has not been approved before as an administrable drug. The vaccine contains mRNA code of the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus, therefore when injected to an individual, the body’s immune system uses this genetic information to train the body to fight off the virus. Antibodies and T-cells are produced by an individual’s body to fight the coronavirus successfully. Hopefully, Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine will pass through the regulatory approval. We hope for the best!