Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine is more than 90% effective

Vaccine developer Pfizer and German partner BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine is more than 90% effective. Dr. Dara Kass, Yahoo Medical Contributor & Columbia University Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine shares the details.

Video transcript

JULIE HYMAN: Now let's get back to the actual news here on Pfizer and just get a little more detail on what all of this could mean. We've already been hearing various comments from President Trump who tweeted this morning about the news. He said, the stock market's a big vaccine coming soon, report 90% effective, such great news.

And Joe Biden, the president-elect, who as we mentioned, is announcing a coronavirus task force, he came out with a statement on it. And he said, this is good news, but his statement on it was less effusive. He said, Americans are going to have to rely on masking, distancing, contact tracing, handwashing, and other measures to keep themselves safe well into next year. Today's news is great news, but it doesn't change that fact.

All right, let's bring in Dr. Dara Kass now. She is Yahoo Medical Contributor and Columbia University Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine. And you just need to unmute yourself, sorry, Dr. Kass. So I would ask, I guess, first of all, about how long it's going to take to, you know-- this has not been approved yet, this is a good step, but it's not approval. So what can we expect now in terms of the timeline sort of to Joe Biden's point there about, you know, we still have a ways to go before this is gone?

DARA KASS: Yeah, I think that's actually a really good opportunity to think about leadership style and what it means in the middle of evolving information. This information is excellent. It's not just good, it's excellent. It means that 90% of the people who are novel to the virus, who had no exposure, were protected by the combination of the two vaccines that they received, which is extraordinary. It's also an interim study, meaning that it has-- it's the data in the middle of their phase three trial, and that we expect them to hopefully have enough data at the completion, somewhere around November, December, to apply for this emergency use authorization.

What Joe Biden was saying, which is really important, is none of that changes the situation we're in right now, which is that this virus is spreading at an exponential rate. We hope that this vaccine, if this is the candidate that gets approved, or any of the other candidates, would be available maybe earliest, end of 2020, early 2021, to get into the arms of most Americans by mid-2021. That is a good seven, eight months away. And right now, we're seeing over 120,000 cases a day with death rates over 1,000 a day, and exponential spread in most American states. We need to get this virus under control, and right now, masks are more important than this vaccine, even though this is really exciting information.

MYLES UDLAND: And Dr. Kass, obviously, the stock market is very excited about this, but a lot of the medical experts that I think we'd all probably follow here on Twitter emphasizing this morning that this is essentially now a roadmap for how we can double down on preventing the spread of COVID-19. You know, I think some folks are saying, oh now COVID is over, but I think you're sort of outlining, no, no, no, we just have more of a sense of how this will evolve over the next nine months.

DARA KASS: Right, this is a really good piece of information for the future. It's important. It's better than it not working, but it's not going to change anything right now. And right now, we're in a really bad place.

And I think a lot of what the scientists that most of you follow on Twitter are saying is, this is still a press release. It's not the data. It's not a paper. It's not peer reviewed.

We have to be patient and optimistic, be honest and transparent about where we are and the work we need to do right now. But we can be a little bit excited. This is the future we're looking into.

MYLES UDLAND: Julie, you're muted.

JULIE HYMAN: Pardon me. I'm muted.

DARA KASS: We're all [INAUDIBLE]

JULIE HYMAN: I need you to tell me this time around. So when we look at all of these different companies that are trying to develop these vaccines, we know that they're using different methods. So the idea that Pfizer might have a successful vaccine, are there any implications for other companies, or is this really just its own news and doesn't mean anything for any of the others?

DARA KASS: So we don't want to get into the weeds of vaccine science too much because most of it's not that relevant to the general population. We know that right now the two mRNA vaccines seem to be the ones going forward with best efficacy for now, and in fact, the viral vector vaccines were the ones that had the complications. Unfortunately, with our experience with viruses and vaccines, we have more experience with viral vector vaccines and not mRNA vaccines.

So I think that this is good news, but it requires us to have a new set of questions about how we're going to deliver this vaccine, how we're going to store this vaccine, how are we going to distribute it nationally in an equitable way? So I think that this does spell out other issues related to the different vaccine candidates. But we do have multiple ways to deliver this vaccine, and this is the mRNA vaccine, which is the newest one. We've never had a vaccine this way, but it's very exciting and promising in it's data.

JULIE HYMAN: All right, a very optimistic note. Thank you so much. Dr. Dara Kass is a Yahoo medical contributor.