BREAKING: Pfizer's COVID vaccine 90 percent successful in trials

A COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer Incorporated and BioNTech SE has been found to be more than 90 percent successful in large-scale trails against the coronavirus.

In a press release made by Pfizer, the development team announced that their vaccine candidate had successfully deterred the spread of COVID-19 in thousands of trials and was now being submitted before the United States Food and Drug Administration for Emergency Use Authorization. Per the release, of the 43,000 test subjects, only 94 returned with positive COVID-19 cases—less than a percent of participants.

The Trump administration had made a deal in June with Pfizer to ensure that the vaccine would be made free to 100 million Americans, upon successful development.

Dr. Albert Bourla, CEO and Chairman of Pfizer, said that their breakthrough represented the beginning of a new chapter in the fight against COVID-19.

“We are reaching this critical milestone in our vaccine development program at a time when the world needs it most with infection rates setting new records, hospitals nearing over-capacity and economies struggling to reopen,” Bourla said.

President Donald Trump took to Twitter to share the good news. In the weeks leading up to election night, the president stressed that the development of a vaccine would provide the confidence the country would need to re-open safely.

For investors and businesses anxiously awaiting news of a vaccine, Pfizer’s test results are a vote of confidence in the future.

Where Pfizer and BioNTech may now be at the frontrunners of those developing a vaccine, they aren’t the only ones in the homestretch of vaccine development. The University of Oxford in association with AstraZeneca is currently in the middle of human trials in Brazil. Johnson and Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline trail the frontrunners only by a month or so. All of these development teams plan to have a releasable product by February.

If approved by the FDA, Pfizer and BioNTech will be set up to release a product before then.

Already, news for the development of a vaccine has reached Wall Street, causing an immediate jump in the DOW.

Like many who continue to look forward to a vaccine deployment, Bourla believes the introduction of a vaccine will directly impact an ability for communities around the world to return to normalcy.

“With today’s news, we are a significant step closer to providing people around the world with a much-needed breakthrough to help bring an end to this global health crisis. We look forward to sharing additional efficacy and safety data generated from thousands of participants in the coming weeks,” Bourla said.