- General
- December 12, 2020
- 3 minutes read
US Greenlights Pfizer’s Covid-19 Vaccine
The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that it’s approved an Emergency Use Authorization for a Covid-19…
The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that it’s approved an Emergency Use Authorization for a Covid-19 vaccine developed by the pharmaceuticals company Pfizer in partnership with the German biotech firm BioNTech, making it the first Covid-19 vaccine to be approved for use in the US.
The approval from the FDA comes just a week after UK authorities approved the same Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer, making Pfizer the first company to get its vaccine approved by the two countries.
Pfizer posted the results of the initial Phase 3 trial for its Covid-19 vaccine this November, reporting an efficacy rate of 95%. The company conducted trials on over 43,000 participants for the initial stage and plans to conduct more even as its vaccine has been greenlighted for emergency use.
The use of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine has been approved for emergency use in the US for individuals 16 years of age or older and could be administered to 20 million Americans in the ‘next coming weeks’, according to Alex Azar, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Notably, Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) doesn’t entail full approval and makes Pfizer’s vaccine under close watch by US authorities. It provides hope to tackle a pandemic that’s claimed nearly 300,000 lives in the US, the highest number of deaths recorded by any country.
Pfizer is among a handful of companies developing Covid-19 vaccines, others including Moderna, which reported an efficacy rate of 94.1% against normal cases and 100% against severe cases from its trials, and the British company AstraZeneca, which reported an average efficacy rate of 70% from its tests.
