A vaccine created by Pfizer and partner BioNTech won the race to prove efficacy in a large trial. But is it the best vaccine of the dozens being tested? If it isn’t, will any slower but better vaccines have a chance?
A press release this week claims the vaccine is 90% effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19. That would mean nearly all of those infections happened in people who got a placebo rather than the vaccine.
The trial isn’t over. It was slated to stop after 164 people of the 44,000 volunteers developed symptoms and tested positive for the virus, but an independent board was allowed to peek at the data early. They waited until they were up to 94 infections to share the preliminary news, according to an article in the medical website STATnews.