According to Pfizer, the US pharmaceutical giant, “Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim analysis.”

This announcement was made on Monday, November 9, 2020. The study for this candidate involved 43,538 participants, with 42% having diverse backgrounds. “It found that fewer than 10% of infections were in participants who had been given the vaccine. More than 90% of the cases were in people who had been given a placebo.”—CNN. The outcome of this study is optimistically high, and it’s constructed professionally. This vaccine could be able to drastically reduce the number of hospitalizations of COVID-19. 

However, optimism should not mean carelessness and this is new territory in the scientific community. Nbcnews states, “Pfizer’s vaccine is a new type of technology that’s never been used in mass human vaccination before and experts caution that much remains unknown about its safety, how long it might work and who might benefit most.”

Pfizer and BioNtech, its German partner, research and development of this vaccine is an amazing achievement. Although, “What’s not yet clear is whether the vaccine is more effective for some groups of people than others, Offit(Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of vaccinology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.) said. Vaccines traditionally do not work as well in older people, who are most vulnerable to COVID-19.” According to USAToday.

The vaccine is new, so there is a lot we don’t know about it yet. “While vaccine effectiveness (VE) can vary, recent studies show that flu vaccination reduces the risk of flu illness by between 40% and 60% among the overall population during seasons when most circulating flu viruses are well-matched to the flu vaccine.” — CDC.