COVID-19 Vaccine Will Be Ready By Year End In ‘Best Case Scenario’:  New York: Pfizer, which has struck a nearly $2 billion deal with the US...

COVID-19 Vaccine Will Be Ready By Year End In ‘Best Case Scenario’: 

New York: Pfizer, which has struck a nearly $2 billion deal with the US government to deliver 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine developed in collaboration with its German partner BioNTech, is hoping to seek regulatory approval for a vaccine “as early as October” this year and have a vaccine on the market by year end.

        

    A “best case scenario” would be approval before year end and a vaccine by year end, according to Pfizer.

    

"In the third quarter of this year, we hope to get into the hospital setting with a drug that is given intravenously to patients hospitalised with COVID,” John Burkhardt, Senior Vice President, Drug Safety Research and Development at Pfizer, said at a news conference in Connecticut Wednesday" .

  "An interesting thing about this vaccine approach is that the mRNA is enclosed in a lipid nanoparticle, so you can imagine the complexity of that. At this site, we are looking at engineering that particle and analyses for it that will allow clinical trials as well as the manufacturing to occur,” Burkhardt said."

  Americans will receive the vaccine for free and the US government can acquire up to an additional 500 million doses. Pfizer and BioNTech said in a statement they could potentially produce more than 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021.

 Pfizer’s vaccine candidate will now go into large scale clinical trials involving 20,000-30,000 patients before end July. It must be proven effective and receive emergency authorisation before it can be distributed.