'90-95% effective': Top US health expert vouches for Pfizer coronavirus vaccine's efficacy

American physician and immunologist Anthony Fauci has said that Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine, which has been developed in collaboration with Germany's BioNTech SE, has an extraordinarily high degree of efficacy. "More than 90 per cent, close to 95 per cent," Fauci said during an interview, adding that this would lead to a turnaround in general scepticism about vaccines that have been developed at top speed.

"What I would hope is that even though there's a degree of scepticism about vaccines in general, that when the general public sees how effective this vaccine is," said Fauci, who's the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

As per Fauci, the vaccine distribution process in the US will start in December. This, he said, will also help reduce the daily spike in coronavirus cases, which reached 1.9 lakh this week.

The US administration has funded the company for the development of Pfizer vaccine. The country has also secured the advanced purchase of the vaccine and aims to cover the entire US population with the COVID-19 vaccine by the year-end.

Pfizer and BioNTech on November 9 said that their COVID-19 vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90 per cent effective in preventing COVID-19. The trial's result was based on the first interim efficacy analysis conducted on November 8, 2020, by an external, independent Data Monitoring Committee (DMC) from the Phase 3 clinical study. The COVID-19 vaccine, BNT162b2, being developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech is in the late-stage vaccine trial.

While Pfizer became the first company to release successful data from a large-scale trial, India's best bets are still the homegrown Covaxin by Bharat Biotech and the home-tested AstraZeneca-Oxford University vaccine. These two vaccine candidates are in equally advanced stages of Phase 3 trials. Unlike Pfizer, these two vaccine candidates are undergoing trials in India and will be available to the masses in the country as soon as tests are completed.

Besides, Russia's Sputnik V vaccine, which is the world's first coronavirus vaccine, is also touted to be 92 per cent effective against coronavirus, the Russian government has claimed.

US-based Moderna Inc, which is developing its vaccine based on mRNA technology (similar to Pfizer), has said that it will release the data on its advanced-stage trials of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate by the month-end. As per the company, it has sufficient data for a first interim analysis of the advanced-phase trial of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate, which should help ascertain the inoculation's efficacy.

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