화이자 백신 20일 사용신청…내달 중순 승인될 수도
With global pharmaceuticals Pfizer and Moderna having announced that they plan to submit application to FDA for emergency use authorization "within days," health officials in the U.S. say healthcare workers could get the first doses in about a month.
FDA process is expected to take a few weeks, and an advisory committee meeting to review the vaccine has been tentatively scheduled for early December.
It's a record-breaking time frame for a process that normally takes about a decade for an effective and safe vaccine.
Bae Eun-ji has more.
COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna could be ready for emergency authorization and distribution in the U.S. as soon as this year.
The U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary said Wednesday local time... that widespread inoculation may even begin "within weeks".
"Every hour, every day matters and so we're going to work to try to minimize any type of delay there."
This comes as Pfizer and its German partner company BioNTech reported their findings from the vaccine's Phase 3 trial... announcing an efficacy rate of 95-percent, consistent across different age groups and ethnicities...and with no serious side effects. The Chief Executive of BioNTech also said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could grant emergency-use before Christmas...if all conditions are met.
"If everything goes well we could start to supply the vaccines to Europe and the United States in the second half of December and you can see that of course as a Christmas present but it is of course, most important, to answer all the questions and to get the approval first."
But challenges still remain over mass production, as the process may take even longer than the vaccine's development.
The type of vaccines that Pfizer and Moderna have developed have never been widely distributed before.
Also, vaccines need to be transported in specific, colder conditions otherwise they can be rendered ineffective. This poses a huge challenge for global drug makers when it comes to vaccine distribution.
Bae Eun-ji, Arirang News.
