HELP NEEDED
DONALD Trump and Joe Biden hailed news that a "free" coronavirus vaccine could be just weeks away the President Elect urged Americans to "wear a mask."
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer says interim findings from its large-scale clinical trial show it had 90 percent efficacy, which was better than expected.
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"It doesn’t matter who you voted for, where you stood before election day,” he said from his native Delaware today.
“We can save tens of thousands of lives if we just wear a mask," he added, after it emerged that he and Kamala Harris had prepared a "blueprint" of how to deal with the virus based on a "bedrock of science."
A 13-person Covid-19 advisory board has been tasked with this, which includes experts from previous administrations.
“Today’s news [about the vaccine] does not change that urgent reality. It won't be forever. But that's how we'll get our nation back up to speed economically," Biden concluded.
The news came just hours after the US crossed the threshold of 10 million cases.
Drugmakers are now expected to seek emergency use authorization later this month in a major victory in the fight against Covid-19.
Trump tweeted on Monday morning: "STOCK MARKET UP BIG, VACCINE COMING SOON. REPORT 90% EFFECTIVE. SUCH GREAT NEWS!"
President-elect Joe Biden said his public health advisers were informed of the Pfizer news last night.
"I congratulate the brilliant women and men who helped produce this breakthrough and to give us such cause for hope," Biden said in a statement.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in an interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta that the vaccine "will be available for free to all American citizens."
The Dow soared 1,600 points at the opening bell on Monday following news of the breakthrough.
However, companies that have been heavily used during the lockdown, including Amazon, Zoom and Netflix, all tumbled.
'GREAT DAY'
The Pfizer vaccine has been tested on 43,500 people in six countries and no safety concerns have been raised.
The firm, which is developing the mRNA-based vaccine with BioNTech, said the results were from a independent interim analysis of the results of its phase three clinical study.
Albert Bourla, Pfizer's chairman and chief executive, said in a statement: "Today is a great day for science and humanity,"
"We are reaching this critical milestone in our vaccine development program at a time when the world needs it most with infection rates setting new records, hospitals nearing over-capacity and economies struggling to reopen."
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Pfizer expects to seek broad US emergency use authorization of the vaccine for people aged 16 to 85.
To do so, it will need to have collected two months of safety data on around half of the study's roughly 44,000 participants, expected in late November.
"I'm near ecstatic," Bill Gruber, one of Pfizer's top vaccine scientists, said in an interview.
"This is a great day for public health and for the potential to get us all out of the circumstances we're now in."
Pfizer said the interim analysis was conducted after 94 participants in the trial developed Covid-19, examining how many of them received the vaccine versus a placebo.
The company did not break down exactly how many of those who fell ill received the vaccine.
Still, over 90 percent effectiveness implies that no more than 8 of the 94 people who caught Covid-19 had been given the vaccine, which was administered in two shots about three weeks apart.
The efficacy rate is well above the 50 percent effectiveness required by the US Food and Drug Administration for a coronavirus vaccine. National Institute of Health chief Dr. Anthony Fauci previously said a vaccine with 50-60 percent effectiveness would be acceptable to begin vaccinations.
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To confirm its efficacy rate, Pfizer said it will continue the trial until there are 164 Covid-19 cases among participants.
Given the recent spike in US infection rates, that number could be reached by early December, Gruber said.
The data is yet to be peer-reviewed or published in a medical journal. Pfizer said it would do so once it has results from the entire trial.
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The UK has 10 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine that could be rolled out by Christmas, once it is approved by regulators.
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Hospitals have been told to prepare for the first doses within three weeks.
Vaccine chiefs said the UK will have stockpiled 10 million doses by the end of the year, with four million doses of the Oxford jab ready in that time too.