Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer on Monday announced promising results from its COVID-19 vaccine trials, showing that it was more than 90% effective in preventing the disease.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said another vaccine from Moderna could have similar results as it also uses a vaccine production technology called mRNA.
Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine trial got its start at Seattle’s Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. The company last month completed enrolling 30,000 volunteers for its crucial Phase 3 trial.
There are several other vaccines in development from companies including AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax. Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center on Monday opened volunteer enrollment for a Phase 3 study for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Dr. Larry Corey, a virologist at Fred Hutch and co-leader of the COVID-19 Prevention Network’s vaccine testing program, called Monday a “momentous day for science.”
“While it remains to be known whether these early results will translate to long-lasting, durable immune response, we should all be greatly encouraged by today’s announcement,” he said in a statement. “This milestone strengthens our imperative to continue enrolling and conducting all of the Phase 3 vaccine trials in our program so that we can get comprehensive data on each of the vaccine candidates. We will need as many types of vaccine platforms as we can define if we are to accomplish the national and global vaccine effort to which we all aspire.”
In the weeks ahead, clinical trials may progress far enough for the Food and Drug Administration to issue emergency use authorizations for promising vaccine candidates. But health experts at last month’s GeekWire Summit stressed that such an authorization would be only an interim step toward getting a vaccine widely distributed.
The Dow jumped more than 1,000 points on the Pfizer news, though some tech “stay-at-home” stocks such as Zoom and Amazon fell.
U.S. COVID-19 cases just topped 10 million.
