A vaccine has been shown to be more than 90% effective in preventing Covid-19. That's good news right? But it sadly doesn't mean we can get the vaccine tomorrow. This is a preliminary analysis from a phase three trial, and more evidence is needed about how safe and effective this vaccine is, and then regulators need to be convinced that it can meet quality standards before it can be given to more people. But before we get too carried away, we really have to be careful about safety and scale around the vaccine. So whilst we can go with confidence, I don't think we're seeing any return to normal by Christmas. But the companies behind the vaccine- that's Pfizer and BioNTech- they're going to apply for emergency approval to use the vaccine by the end of November. We'll do our best, we've been working day and night. The clock never stops in our labs or offices so we'll keep on with that momentum.
This vaccine will need to be given in two doses around three weeks apart. But storing it is going to be a big challenge, it needs to be kept in ultra cold conditions at around -80℃, that's a big challenge. But the companies believe they can supply 50 million doses by the end of this year and around 1.3 billion by the end of 2021. It's important to say this is not the only Covid-19 vaccine currently in development. They are around a dozen at the same stage of testing and we could have others soon. There's a kind of tendency that we… when we get excited about these vaccines is to think about vaccines as a sort of silver bullet and this cannot replace just the time and tested methods of track and trace, monitoring the outbreak, changing our behavior. So extremely exciting, very hopeful but let's not take our eye off the ball of the very basics of how we respond to health crises.
