With the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine being 90 percent effective, Paul Geopfert, a professor at UAB, talks about what that means.
Our top story today - pharamcetutical company pfizer announced their coronavirus vaccine is 90 percent effective based on early anaylsis of the vaccine.
Waay-31's bridget divers spoke to a professor of medicine at the university of alabama at birmingham to learn more about the pfizer vaccine and what it means for the coronavirus pandemic.
Dan, najahe -- pfizer's coronavirus vaccine, if 90 percent effective, would be more effective than the yearly flu vaccine.
But the company still needs to test the vaccine on a larger group of people to make sure it is safe for widespread distribution.
Paul goepfert "i think the most optimistic of us were thinking about 70 percent effective so 90 percent effectiveness is fantastic."
Paul goepfert is a professor of medicine at the university of alabama in birmingham and the director of the alabama vaccine research clinic.
He says that if pzier's vaccine is truly 90 percent effectuve only 60 percent of the united states population would have to get vaccinated for herd immunity.
"that assumes it's 90 percent effective, if on the other hand it's 50 percent effective you will have to vaccinate just about everybody for that."
Pzifer's vaccine would not be readily avalable to the public though -- due to tempertaure constraints.
"this has to be stored at minus 80 degrees celsius and as you probably know most pharmacies in the country don't have that type of storage facility.
So, we would have to develop that infrastructure."
Goepfert says that major academic instituions and most major medical centers do have that storage capacity.
"so i think vaccinating the health care workers will probably be a little bit easier but then if you're talking about going beyond that it's going to take some more dollars to be able to make that happen."
Even with a vaccine though geopfert says that people will still need to wear masks and social distance.
Now i did reach out to two research facilities here in northern alabama that are conducting their own coronavirus vaccine trials but neither were available to comment on pzier's vaccine.
In huntsville, bridget divers, wayy31
A COVID-19 vaccine could make its way to Indiana within the next few months.
