Tension began on social media this Thursday after information on Pfizer and Moderna’s anticovid vaccines went viral which alarmed more than one person, as it began to circulate on the networks that Pfizer had made the vaccine available to the public without having tried it Before. Read here: Modern lawsuit against Pfizer and BioNTech for COVID vaccine patent
That statement sparked thousands of comments on Twitter, where they also expressed their disagreement with the World Health Organization for allegedly approving vaccines that didn’t have enough studies.
The truth
The official media explain that people have found misrepresented information and that it was the same that was being disseminated on social networks.
What actually happened is that Janine Small, president of international markets at Pfizer, told the European Parliament on October 10 that Pfizer did not know if its COVID-19 vaccine had prevented the transmission of the virus before it entered the market in December 2020, but did not give assurances that the vaccine had not been fully tested. It might interest you: would you pay for one? Vaccines against COVID-19 would stop being free in 2023
It all started when a video was made public showing the exchange between Rob Roos, a Dutch Member of the European Parliament, and Small, in which Rob asks Janine if the vaccine has been tested for transmission and she replies: “No, we had to just moving at the speed of science to be able to understand what was happening in the market”.
However, this is incorrect, as Pfizer has been testing its vaccines. Paola Fontanelli, global director of media communications in Latin America for Pfizer, denied that these claims were real and clarified that the pharmaceutical company’s COVID-19 vaccine was being tested to prove its effectiveness against the disease, as reported by the 2020. Read: Warning: Original vaccines still protect against COVID variants
“Our flagship Phase 3 clinical trial was designed to evaluate the efficacy of BNT162b2 in the prevention of diseases caused by SARS-CoV2, including severe disease,” Fontanelli explained to the AP via email. The clinical trial met two critical endpoints, including the efficacy endpoint, which is the prevention of confirmed symptomatic COVID-19 infection, and the secondary endpoint, which is the prevention of severe disease.” Read also: Could there be a universal vaccine against COVID-19?
What Small was referring to during his hearing in the European Parliament was that Pfizer did not carry out tests demonstrating the vaccine’s effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 transmission, but instead focused on avoiding the severity of this disease.
