Pfizer launches human trials of possible COVID-19 vaccine
Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi, Alexis Christoforous, and Anjalee Khemlani break down the latest coronavirus updates.
Video Transcript
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: And a new day, a new milestone in the fight against COVID-19. We have now surpassed 3.6 million people who have contracted the virus with a quarter of a million people dying from it. Here at home, the numbers are still climbing. A little over 1.18 million people have now come down with the coronavirus.
And companies we know are working overtime to come up with a vaccine. Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Khemlani is joining us now. And, Anjalee, researchers have begun giving healthy volunteers in the US an experimental coronavirus vaccine that was developed by Pfizer. This sounds encouraging. What can you tell us?
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: That is correct, Alexis. So that is starting the clinical trial for Pfizer and its partner company BioNTech, which is in Germany. They already started these clinical trials in Germany last week, so this is just a ramp up of that. And, as we know, the more trials, the better. The more randomized trials, the better. And so this follows suit of that.
This, again, is an experimental drug-- vaccine rather, and that is different from the treatments that we've been hearing about recently, like from Gilead. And so this would be one of those things that is sort of the ultimate of what we're looking for to be able to get out of social distancing measures, et cetera. The company has said that it's looking to get their first doses out by September, which is a very accelerated timeline compared to what we've been hearing about the 12 to 18 months since the start of the outbreak.
But it does follow suit along the lines of some other companies like Moderna and like the University of Oxford, which have also said that they could get it within the year. And it's really interesting because Pfizer's technology that they're using is different from traditional vaccine development. They actually are using the same technology that Moderna, which was the first to hit clinical trials, is using, which doesn't require the live virus in order to create the vaccine.
They use basically a synthetic version. Once they know the sequence of the virus, and can move from there. So that has helped in sort of accelerating the timeline and is the reason why we're seeing such promising news.
One of the things to note, though, is that this would be the first time that a vaccine has developed this way, and so there is, as some experts have said, no playbook for this. So it does remain to be seen whether or not they can meet that September timeline. They have said they will start with the millions of doses this year looking to produce hundreds of millions of doses by next year. Alexis.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Yeah, certainly encouraging news there. Thanks for breaking that down for us. I want to ask you before you go about states reopening.
Some states in our country starting to reopen their economies, including California, which was one of the first to actually lock down. Of course, there fear. Health officials keep saying be careful how quickly you open these economies and how you do it because there is fear of that second surge, right?
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Absolutely. And the way that Governor Newsom has been addressing it, has been encouraging, and promising, and comforting in the sense that it's very structured, and that's something we haven't seen from other states. Listen to what he had to say specifically about how they're entering that second phase.
GAVIN NEWSOM: As early as the end of this week, you will have the capacity, as a retailer with the modifications and the guidelines we set forth on Thursday, to begin to reopen for pickup clothing, bookstores, music, toys, sporting goods stores, florists with Mother's Day coming up.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: So, as you can hear, looking to open up the potential where you can deliver things or have-- sorry-- curbside pickup essentially of the products. And then he did mention that there could be restaurants opening in some areas where there are very low case counts. And they have a really robust tracing and testing system set up in place, Alexis.
