BONUS - Dr. Josh Sharfstein on Pfizer's Vaccine and Next Steps
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 13 November 2020
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Pfizer reported some encouraging early results from Phase III of it's COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials. Dr. Josh Sharfstein talks with Stephanie Desmon about what might happen next, when we could see the first doses of vaccines available, and how we should continue vigilance with masks, distancing, and handwashing while waiting for widespread vaccination to bring the pandemic to a heel.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 2 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins |
| 0:11.6 | Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.6 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, |
| 0:18.8 | and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:21.9 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day |
| 0:27.3 | through informative interviews with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health |
| 0:32.7 | officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at |
| 0:39.8 | Public Health Question at jhhh.edu. That's public health question at jh.edu for future podcast |
| 0:47.8 | episodes. Today, our topic is the announcement that a vaccine made by Pfizer and Bio-NTech is effective at preventing COVID-19. |
| 0:58.1 | What's next for the vaccine? I speak with Stephanie Desmond. Let's listen. |
| 1:04.9 | Josh Sharfstein, I'm so happy that we have you back on the program. |
| 1:08.1 | Thanks for having me, Stephanie. |
| 1:09.5 | So today we want to talk about this |
| 1:11.2 | week's really encouraging news from Pfizer about a vaccine. Can you tell us about the news? |
| 1:17.2 | So Pfizer reported some of the results from its big vaccine study. I think there are something |
| 1:22.1 | like 46,000 patients. And they found that the people in the group that got the vaccine were 90% less likely |
| 1:28.8 | to get COVID-19 than the people who got placebo. So that's a really strong showing of effectiveness. |
| 1:35.2 | So where do we go from here? This is still early, right? Well, the company said that it needed to |
| 1:40.5 | collect a few more weeks, I think, of safety data, and then it would bring that |
| 1:44.3 | data in the form of an application to the Food and Drug Administration. From there, the Food and Drug |
| 1:49.7 | Administration reviews the data, and will convene an independent advisory committee to provide |
| 1:55.5 | some input and then make a decision on making it available to groups in the United States. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.