3 things to know about Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine candidate

Pfizer announced Monday that a vaccine candidate in an incomplete large-scale study has shown to be 90% effective against coronavirus. The drugmaker still has several hoops to jump through to bring any vaccine to market, but here’s what we know about this particular drug right now:

• A lot of people have taken this drug: the trial run by Pfizer and German partner BioNTech enrolled 43,538 people, who received one dose in July. Close 40,000 of them got a second dose in November.
• The vaccine candidate requires very cold storage: the drug can’t be kept or transported in typical refrigerators. It requires a freezer that will keep the drug at about 94 degrees below zero. That could present complications for rolling out  the drug to a wide population.
• This is a two-dose drug: In the incomplete trial, participants received two doses of the vaccine candidate. Whether people will need to get a COVID shot twice remains to be seen. The trial also doesn’t provide data for how long a recipient of the vaccine candidate would be protected.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3eGK6Xa