News 12 speaks one-on-one with Pfizer VP about COVID-19 vaccine, efficacy rate

The pharmaceutical company tells News 12 it was kept in the dark to ensure an unbiased and objective study.

News 12 Staff

Nov 11, 2020, 3:30 AM

Updated 1,428 days ago

Share:

Dr. Phil Dormitzer, Pfizer's vice president and chief scientific officer of viral vaccines, spoke one-on-one with News 12 about the company's COVID-19 vaccine and its 90% efficacy rate.
An important thing to note is that the data used to find that over 90% efficacy rate was only seen by a data monitoring committee -not Pfizer.
More than 43,000 people participated: About half got the vaccine, and the other half got the placebo. Only a data monitoring committee knows who got which.
The pharmaceutical company tells News 12 it was kept in the dark to ensure an unbiased and objective study.
The trial participants will be monitored for two years, and Pfizer expects to see more of the data down the line.
It also says it will start vaccinating children as young as 6 years old in January.
Here's a sampling of the interview:
News 12: How did you choose who would be able to participate?
Dr. Phil Dormitzer: In a phase three trial, one of the key things you want to do is to have a group of people that is as representative as it can be of the people who will really use the vaccine in the future and who most need the vaccine...We have a distribution that matches the distribution of the U.S. population quite well. And I should say we also went outside the country as well.
News 12: If approved, you're looking to vaccinate at least 25 million people by the end of this year, so how do you decide who gets those first vaccines?
Dr. Phil Dormitzer: We are not and do not want to be the decision-makers about who does and doesn't get vaccines. That's a public health decision.
News 12: There are people, including the president, who believe the FDA and Democrats conspired to hold these test results until after the election.
Dr. Phil Dormitzer: This was predetermined. The rules of the data monitoring committee was set and we were in close discussions with FDA, so this is entirely science-driven decisions, and political decisions don't come into it in fact if whether results come before or after an election or any other political event doesn't enter into the decision-making