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Last month, the Pfizer Group announced that the vaccine it had developed with the German company BioNTech had been shown to be more than 90% effective. On Wednesday 2 December, Pfizer received approval from UK health officials to begin distributing it for widespread use.
Pfizer applied for emergency approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but it refused to authorize the vaccine. An infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, said, in relation to British colleagues, that “they were in too much of a rush with this approval” and praised the FDA’s “very careful” approval process.
While the two pharmaceutical developers insist on the effectiveness of the vaccine, the inability to stop the transmission of the virus carrier could mean that vaccination does not live up to the expectations expressed by some US officials.
Half test
Pfizer’s massive trials worked as follows: 50% of each group of more than 40,000 volunteers were vaccinated with two doses per person, and the other half two doses of a placebo. Then they waited.
The researchers monitored whether the test subjects developed possible coronavirus symptoms or side effects after administration of the vaccine. The end point of the Pfizer vaccine study was that 164 people in the entire trial were diagnosed with coronavirus.
Achieving the main goals does not mean that a drug manufacturer knows everything it needs to know about how, if it works, and how well its experimental prevention or treatment works.
Pfizer recruited people who were essential workers or generally susceptible to coronavirus infection, but did not monitor how they actually behaved or track their contacts (unless they were likely to be infected). , one participant gave positive results).
Pfizer and Moderna also did not evaluate asymptomatic participants. Finally, 162 people who received the placebo injection developed coronavirus symptoms and tested positive, while only eight in the vaccinated group were infected.
This is a strong sign that the vaccine is preventing people from getting sick. However, it does not tell researchers if people contracted the virus but did not develop symptoms, or if someone transmitted the infection.
Clinical trials are considered to have sufficient information to assess whether a drug is working when it meets previously established ‘endpoints’ agreed to by manufacturers and regulators.
The Pfizer CEO said the data suggests vaccination could prevent asymptomatic infections, increasing the chances that these people will not transmit the virus, but it is too early to say for sure.
Pocket certainties
Interestingly, however, the Pfizer CEO did not voice these uncertainties a few days earlier, when the announcement of positive results from a clinical trial of its experimental Covid-19 vaccine led to higher share prices. The company’s shares rose 15% on Monday, after Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech announced that the vaccine was more than 92% effective in preventing Covid-19 in those tested.
On the same day, Monday, November 30, Albert Bourla sold shares of the US pharmaceutical group worth almost 5.6 million dollars, reports Hotnews.ro, from Reuters sources.
The Pfizer CEO sold $ 5.6 million group shares on the day of the announcement of the positive results of the Covid-19 vaccine study. The sale represented 61.8% of Bourla’s directly and indirectly owned shares.
Pfizer confirmed the sale in a statement, adding that Bourla has a larger stake in the company’s “qualified and unqualified savings plans”, which likely means stock options. “He now owns his stake in Pfizer nine times after this week’s sale,” a company spokesman said.
Albert Bourla (b. 1962 in Greece) became CEO of Pfizer on January 1, 2019. He received a monthly base salary of $ 1.65 million as of April 1. His total compensation increased 82% in 2020, compared to last year, reaching $ 17.9 million annually, according to the specialized website lohnspiegel.org.
