‘An all-day hearing of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee closed, on Thursday evening, with a vote to recommend an Emergency Use Authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech covid-19 vaccine for people sixteen and older.
‘The proceedings involved a great deal of data and technical talk, but might be quickly summarized this way: there are things we still do not know about the vaccine, but nothing that we do know looks bad. Indeed, the vaccine looks very, very good. And its known goodness applies to a diverse range of populations, including Black and Latinx and older people. An F.D.A. analysis of the raw data, released earlier this week, confirmed previous reports that the vaccine’s efficacy in preventing disease in trial participants was close to ninety-five per cent. That number held up under questioning from committee members, who represented a range of specialties, from pediatrics to virology, throughout the eight hours of the hearing.
‘Amid a pandemic—on a day when more than three thousand people in this country were reported to have died from covid-19—that result is far more than it would have been reasonable to hope for even a couple of months ago. As Dr. Doran Fink, of the F.D.A., said in one of the day’s presentations, there is no “adequate, approved, and available alternative.” It was a long day, but a reassuring and even energizing one.’
Read here (The New Yorker, Dec 11, 2020)
