No news on Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine is good news — and bad news

No news on Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine is good news — and bad news Pfizer and BioNTech are under a white-hot spotlight because their vaccine, by design, is likely to be the first to have any efficacy data. Matthew Herper STAT

Pfizer revealed Tuesday that researchers have not yet conducted an analysis of the efficacy of the vaccine it is developing against Covid-19.

The announcement is both good news and bad news. 

Umer Raffat, a senior managing director at the investment bank Evercore ISI, wrote in an analyst note that the fact that Pfizer hasn’t conducted an interim analysis was “a good thing” because it means that, based on the details of the trial protocol, the vaccine had not failed to prevent more than 77% of Covid cases, the benchmark for success at this early juncture.

But it also suggests that cases of Covid are being reported less frequently among participants in the Pfizer study than in the U.S. as a whole. That means that the study is progressing more slowly than Pfizer and its partner, BioNTech, originally expected. In August, Pfizer had thought that the first interim analysis could occur as early as September.   ...