United States President-elect Joe Biden has used his first major speech since winning the election to urge Americans to wear masks to slow the spread of the coronavirus that has exceeded 100 000 daily new infections in the country over the last three days.
He spoke on a day that pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced that its COVID-19 vaccine was 90% effective based on initial trial results, news that was welcomed by the markets.
Below is President-Elect Joe Biden’s Nation Address:
Biden also named and met with a newly formed COVID-19 advisory board as the pandemic, along with the economy, remains top of his agenda as he formally gets his transition to the White House underway.
The Pfizer news was broadly welcomed after the pharmaceutical company and its German partner BioNTech revealed they had found no serious safety concerns and expected to seek US authorization later this month for emergency use of the vaccine, an approval that only the Food and Drug Administration can give.
Vaccine
Pfizer’s CEO & Chairman Albert Bourla lauded the vaccine’s progress. He indicated that as they seek approval for the vaccine that they could have up to 50 million doses available before the end of the year and about 1.3 billion doses for 2021.
This comes as Biden displayed some of the urgency with which his team will address the pandemic, appointing a 13 person COVID advisory board, as the country surpassed 10 million cases since the virus first appeared in January.
Biden said he had spared no effort to turn the pandemic around once sworn into office next year.
The US has recorded over 237 000 deaths from COVID-19 since January. While the Pzifer vaccine and others show great promise, it’s never been viewed as a silver bullet, and in the absence of FDA and other administrative approvals and the necessary scientific peer-reviews that must still analyse their data, wearing masks, washing hands and social distancing remain protocols that cannot as yet be discarded.
In the video below, Prof. Shabir Madhi reacts to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine:
