It’s safe, it works, and it gives a tantalising glimpse of what else might be achieved given sufficient political will
- Dr Charlotte Summers is a lecturer in intensive care medicine at the University of Cambridge
Most of us have had endured some very dark days in 2020, whether trying to juggle working from home alongside schooling children, worrying about how to pay the bills as a consequence of unemployment or, like me, attempting to balance scientific research alongside clinical work in the fight against Covid-19. As a scientist, I firmly believe that scientific progress will provide the exit strategy from this pandemic. But I’ve often worried that we may not be able to achieve what’s needed to prevent the spread of this virus, or that doing so would take a very long time. Never have I been happier to be proved wrong.
Britain is the first country to authorise emergency use of a vaccine for Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. So how did we get here so quickly? To gain the seal of approval from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the UK body that makes sure medicines are safe, the vaccine, developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, has been through three phases of clinical trials. In the third phase, it was administered to more than 43,000 volunteers with no serious safety concern. The data shows that the vaccine is 95% effective at preventing the development of Covid, with similar efficacy observed across age, gender, race and ethnicity groups, including older adults.
