On Monday, American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and partner BioNTech announced interim analysis of late-stage trials of their coronavirus ...
On Monday, American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and partner BioNTech announced interim analysis of late-stage trials of their coronavirus vaccine candidate. The company said early results showed that trial volunteers who received the vaccine experienced 90% fewer cases of symptomatic Covid-19 than volunteers who received a placebo. This data has not been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
How promising is this early data? In the event of regulators granting approval once the safety data was made available at the end of November, what are the problems in vaccine deployment we could encounter in India? Scroll.in spoke to medical scientist Dr Gagandeep Kang, professor of microbiology at CMC Vellore, known for her work on vaccines.
The first interim efficacy analysis of the clinical trial data by an outside panel of experts has shown, as per Pfizer’s statement, that the vaccine it is developing with BioNtech is more than 90% effective. Can you please explain this?
A large clinical trial is a blinded, controlled study with a proportion of people (volunteers) receiving the vaccine and a proportion of people receiving the placebo. The Pfizer study is a 1:1 randomisation, which means half the people in the trial get the vaccine, the other half don’t get it.
You then follow up and see...
