It's Tuesday, November ten. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. Great news on the vaccine front. Fiser's COVID nineteen vaccine candidate has been shown to be nine effective in early findings. The fires Are vaccine is a two shot protocol given three weeks apart. They're still waiting on more data, but could possibly apply for an emergency use authorization before the
end of November. Karen Weintraub, health reporter at USA Today joins us for what to know about the latest vaccine news. Thanks for joining us, Karen, thanks for having me. Got some great news on the vaccine front today, the fires Are vaccine that's in collaboration with bio in Tech. They said that their vaccine candidates is shown to be effective
in their early findings. They've enrolled over forty people and I think about thirty nine thousand of them or so have gotten the two shot protocol that is required on this one, and they're saying that they're getting great results on this. So Karen to us a little bit more about this. Yeah, it's really exciting. It's better than most
people expected of the results would be. So the way this works is they vaccinate a bunch of people and then wait for them to get sick, and there are different kind of moments at which they take a look at the data. The companies don't have access to the
data as time goes on. It's an independent board that knows half the participants are in a placebo group and half aren't, and so they have to wait to look and see did more people get infected in the placebo group versus the non placebo group, the active vaccine group. And that's what happened in this case. The vaccine was effective at preventing infection in those people who got the vaccine. In this first batch of data, it seemed like only
trial participants actually came down with covide. Is that right? Yes, And that's what they do. They originally they were going to give us results that's thirty two participants, but they decided to go to over ninety just for more more assurance, and they'll stop at a hundred and sixty four because at that point, once they've been that many infections, they're
sure that the vaccine will be effective. When we were hearing about all the development and when things get approved and all they were saying that if something is fifty to six effective, then that would be even good enough to get some type of authorization. So this is a lot better than that. And the two doses that they were given are given three weeks apart. Right, that's true for the Fiser vaccine. It's different for the other vaccines. But yes, that's right. So what's the reaction been so far?
I know President Elect Joe Biden has said some stuff on this. President Trump has also weighed in on this. What's the reaction for all of it? Everybody's ecstatic. I mean, it literally couldn't be any better. There's no such thing as effective vaccine. Probably won't be that effective in the real world. People are sicker than they are when their trial participants, or have other things going on, they wait too long, other things, life intervenes. But a number like
this couldn't be any better. I just hunt up with a doctor who said he called his parents and said, I have the first really good news in nine months for you, um talking about this result. That's great. Now, A couple of interesting things on this, this particular that seen candidate uses the m r n A and no product like this has ever been approved by regulators, so this would be a first if this goes all the
way through and gets that authorization. It's new technology that luckily was under development before COVID for other conditions, and when COVID came along, all they really need to do is plug in the genetic code and they have a new vaccine for a new disease. And that's what they did in this case, and that's why they were able to turn it so quickly and bring it to the public so quickly. So they're waiting for a little bit
more data. They're saying that maybe by the end of this month they can already put in the request for an emergency use authorization. So today's data was effectiveness data. What they're still waiting for safety data. And what the FDA has required is that they have to at least no median of half of the people have to have
been out two months from their vaccine. So if you're going to have a side effect from the vaccine, it's most likely to happen in the first six weeks, and so they wanted to get a cushion beyond that more than half the people in the trial beyond that point, and that will they will hit that in the third week of November. The other interesting part of this particular vaccine candidate that it was not necessarily part of Operation Warp Speed. The federal government didn't pay to help develop
this particular vaccine candidate. And beyond that, the amount of doses that they're expected to produce, what do we know about that? The federal government has paid for five other vaccines under development to bring them to the point of clinical trials, and through clinical trials, Fiser said, we've got this. We don't need your money for that. But they have taken almost or been promised almost two billion dollars for
making doses of the vaccine. The companies say that they can have fifty million doses before the end of this year and over a billion next year. And that's the hard part too, is getting enough doses, uh, for people to get their shots. And especially it's the shoot two shot protocols, so you need twice as many really for every person. Finally, where do we stand on some of
the other vaccine candidates. I know Maderna is said to have some news pretty soon, and and then obviously we have a few others that are already in phase three trials. Maderna their first interim results. It was supposed to be around now in the next week or two. It may be pushed off if they wait for more results like Fiser did, but we were expected to hear around now from Maderna. Novavax, which is another federally funded vaccine project. They should be able to start Phase three in the
next couple of weeks. Astra Zeneca, which is collaborating with Oxford University. There in phase three Johnson and Johnson tonofi Um, but they haven't started to Phase three trials. Yeah. Well, I mean, all in all, great news on this front. So we'll see how this develops. It It seems like it's gonna start happening really fast, and then it will take some time still to get all those vaccine doses
out to the public. But we're on our way. Karen Wine, trial health reporter at USA Today, Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. I'm Astar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget today's big news stories. He can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday Friday US So follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast.