Cautious optimism is being felt by many after American pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced on Monday that its vaccine may be 90 per cent effective at preventing COVID-19.
The announcement doesn’t mean a vaccine is ready to go but does provide hope that one could be ready by early next year.
“This morning Canadians woke up to very encouraging news from Pfizer and BioNTech about their vaccine candidate,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said during a press conference on Monday. “Canada signed a deal with them in August to secure millions of doses...We hope to see vaccines landing early next year.”
Although this is welcoming news, Infectious Diseases Specialist Dr. Isaac Bogoch said more data needs to be provided to get a clearer sense of the vaccine candidate.
“This could be phenomenal. Now, I’ve got to temper my excitement with this science by press release. It’s clearly exciting but we don’t know what the data is. A company saying ‘our product is 90 per cent effective,’ I don’t actually know what that means and I don’t think anyone does. We’re trying to read between the lines here,” Bogoch told CP24 Monday morning.
According to Bogoch, Pfizer’s announcement likely means that the product they’re developing is ‘probably over performing based on their expectations.’
“I still think we need to have a little bit of patience to look at what the true effectiveness of this vaccine is and the safety profile of this vaccine. I think we’re probably going to see the data release imminently like this week or next week or sometime in November,” he said.
Pfizer’s analysis, contributed from an independent data monitoring board, looked at 94 infections recorded so far in a study that has enrolled almost 44,000 people in the U.S. and five other countries.
Pfizer did not provide any more details about those cases and warned the initial protection rate might change by the time the study ends.
Officials have said that it is unlikely that any vaccine will arrive before the end of the year and limited initial supplies will be rationed.
The vaccine, made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, are among 10 possible vaccine candidates in late-stage testing around the world.
Once a vaccine is ready for distribution, Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott said the government will have to tackle some challenges around distribution.
“Distributing the vaccine is going to have many challenges of course in terms of refrigeration or freezing, whatever needs to be done. That’s why we really need to have a detailed plan for when we receive the doses of the vaccine,” Elliott said during a press conference on Monday.
She added that a unit at the Ministry of Health is currently planning how to distribute a vaccine and will have a detailed plan ready by the time a vaccine is approved.
Pfizer said it doesn’t plan to stop its study until it records 164 infections among all the volunteers, a threshold that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has agreed is enough to tell how well the vaccine is working.
The FDA has said that any vaccine must be at least 50 per cent effective.
Bogoch added that COVID-19 vaccines “are headed along the right path” but sufficient data is needed to determine their success.
“Let’s pour over the data to really bring it back to planet earth and understand what this really means and how we can integrate this into our lives, if at all.”
