Your Weekly Covid-19 Vaccine Update
Everything that happened in the race to find a coronavirus vaccine this week
There are still 11 vaccines in phase 3 clinical trials and six approved for limited use — no change from last week. None have been approved for general use.
A reality check on the vaccine timeline
For months, President Donald Trump has claimed that a Covid-19 vaccine will be available by Election Day despite experts arguing that it’s not going to happen. On Tuesday, Pfizer, a front-runner in the vaccine race, admitted that the highly anticipated results from its phase 3 trials wouldn’t be available by the end of October — a sharp contrast to what the company had predicted and touted in previous weeks, as the New York Times reported. The next day, Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a JAMA interview that a vaccine might not be available until at least next year: “Could be January, could be later. We don’t know,” he said. In the big Food and Drug Administration vaccine committee hearing last week, experts argued that people who receive an experimental vaccine need to be followed for a longer period than the current regulations demand. Doing so would allow experts to gather more safety data, but it would delay the approval…
