I've seen this all over the place, yes this is good news but lets be a bit more realistic here. It didn't show 90% protection - they showed 90% of people produced a robust immune response within 7 days of their 2nd dose of the vaccine. https://twitter.com/WelshGasDoc/status/1325772712137121792

There are 43,500 people in six countries on the trial this includes those on the control arm.

This reporting comes as they reach a stage in the trial where everyone has been immunised twice either with the control or the vaccine.

NOTE - we have reached the FIRST reporting point of the trial. There is another 24 months left on the clinical trial.

So far, across all 43,500 people on the trial, 94 cases of COVID have been reported. I do not know the exact number of cases in control vs vaccine group.

There will be more reporting to come, more stages, more analysis, this trial frankly is just properly starting.

The first stage reporting data is good though and plenty reasons to be optimistic.

1 - This vaccine is an mRNA vaccine. It is the first major test of a new vaccine technology that some were sceptical of because it involves mRNA being used, your body makes the viral antigen, your body reacts to it, you produce an immune response.

If the mRNA vaccines are working to this level, then its going to be relatively safe to assume that the more traditional vaccines (the adenovirus vectored vaccine in the UK for example) which are "easier" to get to work are likely to also be in the same ballpark.

At the moment the UK vaccine trial is still undergoing administration of the vaccine and has not yet reached first reporting point. However, given the data from phase II of both vaccines I'd expect them both to have >90% induction of immune response.

Given the US vaccine trials are being done in countries with huge circulating levels of SARS-CoV2 at the moment, we will likely have a large number of people end up infected on the trial giving decent data at the end of it.

Lets be clear, you're not going to have a licenced vaccine by Christmas.

Wrap your expectations seriously. This is very very very good news but you can not rush out clinical trials nor should we.

What you SHOULD however do, is given the results we have already anticipate a vaccine being licenced and pressure your governments into having ready to go mass vaccination programs and plans ready when it is licenced and production of the vaccine kicks off.