In this video from Motley Fool Live registered on December 14, Corinne Cardina, head of the health care and cannabis office, and Fool.com contributor Brian Orelli discuss the launch of the first coronavirus vaccine in Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) and BioNTech (NASDAQ: BNTX). While the Food and Drug Administration authorized the vaccine, there were a few unanswered questions at the advisory committee meeting. They also discuss how difficult it is for investors to estimate the production side of the launch.
Corinne Cardina: Let’s start with the news about the COVID-19 vaccine. As I’m sure everyone knows, Pfizer and BioNTech, their vaccine candidate was approved by the FDA last week. Today, the first American received the vaccine, obviously, outside of studies, and he was a critical care nurse in New York. Brian, when the FDA group, their advisory committee, when they met last week, is there anything that came out of that group that is of special interest to investors?
Brian Orelli: Yes. I think there really were three things. First, there is the one-hit or two-hit debate. So there was a chart that was spinning in the FDA information documents. When they measured the effectiveness, they started one week after the second dose, but the FDA showed a graph that showed starting with the first dose. So you would have expected the vaccine and the placebo group to follow each other for the first to second dose or even through a week after the second dose, and then they would split, but they split almost immediately after the first dose. dose. So, it seems that the first dose offers at least some protection, but Pfizer was not willing to say that it could make a single dose just because that’s not how the process was set up, so it looks back, not hypothesized. led, so they were not interested in making a formal decision to enter only a single dose, and the FDA, surprisingly, decided to approve the two-dose regimen.
The second thing was that there is a lot of debate about 16-year-olds versus 18-year-olds as a minimum amount in which the thresholds should be set for who the authorization should be. I think some of the – there were four votes and I heard that at least some people said that the reason they voted was not because they thought it should be 18 versus 16.
Then the third thing and I’m not sure how much he weighed this during the meeting, but it was in the briefing. There was some evidence of reinfections. So, for example, there were over 1,000 people in the study who had COVID-19 before, and then 19 of them developed COVID-19 and there were 10 in the vaccine group and nine in the placebo group and all but to one of them, they were between dose one and dose two. So there may not be much protection, but there is definitely reinfection. and I think it may depend on how sick you get sick the first time. So, if you are asymptomatic for the first time, then you may not develop enough antibodies and then you can reinfect yourself.
cardinal: Absolutely. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar attended Fox Business last week, saying a lot of different things, including that he expects general vaccination for the public, beyond these high-priority groups, to be launched by the end of the month. February, early March and until the second quarter of 2021, everyone who wants a vaccine in the US will be able to receive it. Brian, do you think it’s too rosy a prospect or is it something that could realistically happen?
Orelli: I mean, I think it depends on the manufacture, it also depends on – I mean, we’ll probably have two vaccines at that time because Modern (NASDAQ: MRNA) will probably be authorized this week. But from an investor perspective, I think it’s very hard to say, because the company only offers how many doses it expects to be administered throughout 2021, and so it’s hard to know how much is coming in the first few months of the year. I imagine it probably won’t be linear – divide this number by 12 and that’s all you’ll get in January. It will probably be less than that.