Pfizer increases the effectiveness of its vaccine to 95%

The pharmaceutical company points out that in its last evaluation “the efficacy was constant according to age, gender, race and ethnicity.”

The pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced that its vaccine against covid-19 has an efficacy of 95% starting 28 days after the first dose, according to a statement from the company itself, which already issued a first efficacy evaluation a few days ago.

According to the statement, in this latest phase three evaluation, 170 confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been identified, of which 162 were detected in the placebo group compared to 8 in those who were administered the vaccine. In total, more than 41,000 people have participated in this trial around the world.

“Efficacy was constant according to age, gender, race and ethnicity,” says the company’s statement, which highlights that “the efficacy observed in adults over 65 years was greater than 94%.”

According to Pfizer, the data shows that the vaccine was well tolerated in all populations with more than 43,000 enrolled participants and that no serious safety concerns were observed. The only major side effects have been fatigue (3.8%) and headache (2%).

Both Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech plan to send their findings to the US and European drug agencies within days, to share the data with other regulatory agencies around the world.

The companies expect to produce up to 50 million doses of vaccines globally in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021, the Pfizer statement said.

In that note, Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla says that “the study results mark an important step in this historic eight-month journey to present a vaccine capable of helping end this devastating pandemic.”

“We continue to advance at the speed of science to collect all the data collected so far and share it with regulators around the world,” he said.

For his part, Ugur Sahin, co-founder of BioNTech, stated that “these achievements highlight the potential of messenger RNA as a new class of drug. Our goal from the beginning was to design and develop a vaccine that would generate rapid and powerful protection against COVID-19 and a benign tolerability profile at all ages ”.

“We believe that we have succeeded with our BNT162b2 vaccine candidate in all age groups studied so far and we look forward to sharing more details with regulatory authorities,” he said.

The phase 3 clinical trial of BNT162b2 began on July 27 and involved 43,661 people, 41,135 of whom received a second dose of the candidate vaccine.