The latest news in the race for an effective COVID-19 vaccine is certainly encouraging. Pharmaceutical company Pfizer has developed a vaccine that has proven 90% effective at preventing the SARS-CoV-2 disease during late-stage trials, indicating that the US is closing in on being able to provide a safe vaccine for the virus that has caused a global health crisis and caused over 200,000 deaths in the US alone.
More from MamásLatinas: Everything there is to know about coronavirus vaccines so far
Still, a COVID-19 vaccine is not likely to be widely available until at least the spring. Although Pfizer's results are promising, there are still many questions to be answered about the virus itself and the vaccine. Here's what you need to know about the vaccine and why we need more information before it's distributed.
The vaccine's been tested on over 40,000 people.
The Pfizer vaccine was tested on over 43,000 people in its late-stage trials. Individuals were randomly administered two doses of either the COVID vaccine or a placebo 28 days apart. A week after the second dose was administered, the vaccine appeared to be 90% effective.
Most people who got the vaccine did not get the virus.
"This shows that most people who developed infection were placebo recipients, and most of those who got the actual vaccine did not get infected," Dr. Sunil Sood, chair of pediatrics and an infectious disease specialist at Northwell Health's Southside Hospital, told Healthline.
Pfizer will ask the FDA for an Emergency Use Authorization for the vaccine.
Pfizer has confirmed that it plans to request an Emergency Use Authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) some time this month. It expects to manufacture up to 50 million doses of the vaccine by the end of 2020 and as many as 1.3 billion doses in 2021.
We don't know how long the vaccine is effective.
While the vaccine's efficacy rate is encouraging, it is still not yet clear how long Pfizer's vaccine remains effective. That means researchers don't yet know how long it will provide immunity or if a booster will be necessary for continued protection from the novel coronavirus.
It may not work in preventing severe infections.
"If researchers can show that people who are vaccinated and still get COVID-19 have milder disease, that would be a huge winner," Dr. Carlos Malvestutto, an infectious disease expert at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, told Healthline. However, the vaccine's efficacy on people who still contract the virus has not yet been studied. Though it's possible that with the US currently experiencing a second wave of infections, more information on this may be available soon.
Long-term safety data is not available.
Although the Pfizer vaccine will meet all of the FDA's minimum safety standards and requirements, there will not be any long-term safety data available for the vaccine for some time. So while no major side effects have been recorded to this point, we won't have the full picture for some time. Researchers plan to follow the trial participants for two years after the second dose is administered.