Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

The interview the clowns on CNBC did was actually really good. Someone asked Bourla what you are bringing up. ... Something like, "You know that Trump is going to accuse you of withholding this until after the election in a plot to get him. How are you going to deal with that?"

Bourla's response was that the election timeline was always artificial and it was never Pfizer's timeline. The pressure they have been feeling is the pandemic, it was not the U.S. election. He didn't say this, but as an aside Bourla is Greek, not American. Pfizer had put something out saying they hoped to have interim results by the end of October. He said he is ecsatic that they came so close to that goal.

EDIT: He said he was notified of the interim results yesterday afternoon.

 

This doesn't need to be peer reviewed, although if anyone wants to try to replicate their results they certainly can. It just needs regulatory approval. The peer review would have been important on people being able to replicate their spike protein in a lab and their delivery system, and they got past that before they got to this point.

In the U.S., the FDA will look at how their trial was conducted and evaluate the results. On these phase 3 trials in humans, they have an independent entity do the evaluation to help protect against Pfizer or BioNTech trying to fudge results.

I saw Walter Isaacson, the writer, being interviewed earlier. He is a part of the trial. He said when he went in, one of the doctors told him to look her in the eyes, and not look at the person who was going to jab him, because even though he probably wouldn't be able to tell, they didn't want him to have any inkling of whether he was getting the vaccine or the placebo. Then he kept a diary in an app that got send back to the independent party.

As far as patience, HHS in the U.S. will decide how the vaccine gets rolled out, since the government is going to be in charge of this. Once it is approved (beyond the emergency use authorization) they are likely to get, there will probably be limited supply. They will probably give it to nursing homes, health care workers, first and work on down in order of priority based on some subjective assessment of who should get it first. So people who want to be first in line may have to wait a bit longer than they want. Pfizer has been manufacturing doses all along, so hopefully things go fairly smoothly and it's available relatively quickly.

 

Oh, one other thing. ... This is two doses. You need to get the shot, then head back a month later for a booster.

 

This is such a beautiful thing. They didn't have to worry about some bureaucrat from the government getting a bug up their ass and demanding to know how the money was being spent or slowing things down by wanting to give input or insisting on knowing exactly what the companies were doing. They kept control, and with the size of Pfizer and its resources, and the science BioNTech has, that may have been a winning combo.

Also, now on the distribution, the U.S. can't claim that we need to get all of the first doses in some lame "America First" play. We likely will get a lot of what they manufacture first, because much of it is being manufactured here and we'll be willing to pay, but the science behind this came from a German company and the funds were all private.

 

It will be something like a $35 per dose thing, but I suspect that it is going to be free to people with the government picking up the cost.

EDIT: At $35 per dose, it will still end up being a huge margin / profit for Pfizer. People need to keep in mind, though, that they took all the risk on it. If it didn't work, they would have eaten all of the development cost, and it wasn't insignificant.