The news from Pfizer is great, but it's not just about fighting Covid. The Pfizer candidate is an mRNA vaccine, the tech to produce them didn't exist until recently.

If mRNA vaccines a proven to work against Covid, the possibilities are mind-blowing. https://cen.acs.org/business/start-ups/mRNA-disrupt-drug-industry/96/i35

Not only that, but due to the way they're designed, they'd be immensely safe. The concept is to trigger your cells to produce the spike protein (just the spike, not the virus body) on their own...

With the spike about your system (but no virus), your cells then make things that recognise the spikes. If the virus itself arrives later (with the spikes on it), your system knows the spikes and has stuff to prevent the spikes from sticking to your cells: prevent infection.

Other vaccines function by weakening the virus in the lab, then exposing your system to the weakened virus. Or bolting the spike from one virus onto the virus body of another. Both ways involve putting actual virus into the system, in very controlled ways. mRNA vax don't.

Luke O'Neill said to me back in April 'if ever there was a good time for a pandemic to happen, it's now. We've got all these new technologies.'

mRNA vaccines being one which - until now (?) - hadn't borne fruit.

How they work:

Statement Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is sort of the international co-ordination initiative for developing plans to fight epidemics (namely, now, Covid): "Hugely positive and encouraging" but warns about cold-transporting needs. https://cepi.net/news_cepi/cepi-statement-in-response-to-announcement-from-pfizer-biontech-positive-interim-data-from-phase-iii-trial-of-covid-19-vaccine-candidate/

Tweeted this earlier but adding it to this thread: https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/09/covid-19-vaccine-from-pfizer-and-biontech-is-strongly-effective-early-data-from-large-trial-indicate/ Stat News is brilliant, they have the caveats there.

The data is preliminary, but the CEPI statement linked above isn't hyperbolic. Lot of excitement about seeing the core data now.

Best way to keep up with that excitement is to subscribe to my old work-wife @Gavinsblog's Covid Twitter list.

The Covid nerd's list of reliable Covid nerds. Pin it on the Twitter app for easy use.

Also, this thread: https://twitter.com/ArmstrongDrew/status/1325769922874576896?s=20

Lastly, to note, it's now 314 days since China notified the WHO about the existence of an emerging virus, later named SARS-Cov-2.

The first 100 days were covered here. Scientists are smashing it.