Number of the Day
How Many People Can Get the Vaccine in 2020, by the Numbers
By the end of the year, Pfizer will have enough of its Covid-19 vaccine to immunize 25 million people
25 million: That’s how many people the pharmaceutical company Pfizer says its Covid-19 vaccine can protect by the end of 2020, according to Reuters.
This month, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and, most recently, AstraZeneca-Oxford all published promising results from robust trials of Covid-19 vaccines. Given the indications that these vaccines are effective, the question now turns to when they can be rolled out to the public.
Last week, Pfizer asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve its vaccine for emergency use. The FDA will meet to make that call on December 10. Unlike Moderna, which received $2.5 billion to develop its mRNA vaccine from the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed, Pfizer did not use government money to develop its vaccine. But it did sign a $1.95 billion agreement in July to sell 100 million doses of the vaccine to the federal government.
Pfizer says it will have 50 million doses available by the end of the year, but only half of those doses will go to the United States, and since each person requires two doses…
