PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The FDA’s full approval of the Pfizer vaccine is a huge milestone in the fight against COVID-19. But for the man who pioneered the mRNA technology behind it, it’s just a footnote in a 20-year effort.
University of Pennsylvania researcher Dr. Drew Weissman agrees that the FDA’s approval is fantastic, but he is perplexed by some people who have been holding out for this. The third-stage clinical trials are what proved the mRNA vaccine to be safe and effective, so he said the final FDA approval is a sort of epilogue.
“To be honest, we’ve already moved on,” he said.
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Weissman and his partners are already working on preparing for the next potential pandemic.
“We’ve had three coronavirus epidemics in the past 20 years. You have to assume there’s going to be more, so last summer we started working on a vaccine that will prevent any coronavirus in bats from crossing over into humans,” he explained. “We can either be prepared the next time a new case appears, or we can give the vaccine now to protect people from any future coronavirus infection.”
That forward-thinking is what allowed Pfizer, via the mRNA technology that Weissman helped perfect over decades, to come up with a COVID-19 vaccine astoundingly fast — a triumph of modern medicine that some health officials called miraculous.
And yet, false information about it has stymied its potential to end the pandemic and instead caused another surge, something that still frustrates him.
A lot of the skepticism is political, he noted, which he believes should have nothing to do with it.
“It just doesn’t make sense to me that you would risk a 1 in 200 chance of dying when you can take a vaccine and be protected,” Weissman said. “The vaccine has been given to over half a billion people. It’s proven to be incredibly safe and incredibly effective. If people required FDA approval to take it, now they’ve got it, and I hope they take it.”
