Drug giant Pfizer and German biotech firm BioNTech have just announced that they have a coronavirus vaccine which is 90% effective. Is it time to party yet?

You won’t be surprised to hear that things are a bit more complicated than that—but this is still legitimate cause for optimism. Find out about the good, the bad and the logistically challenging by watching the video!

Video chapters
00:00 What we know
01:09 mRNA vaccines
02:18 The caveats
04:58 How much can we make?
07:51 Why I really hope this works

Sources

Here are some of the sources I used when researching this video:

Pfizer and BioNTech’s press release about the results: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-rel...

Excellent BBC News article on the subject: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-548...
If you want to know a bit more, this STAT article goes into more detail than the BBC: https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/09/c...

A statement from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, CEPI, putting the results into context: https://cepi.net/news_cepi/cepi-state...

Twitter thread on the logistical difficulties of transporting a vaccine at −80°C:   / 1325774250888884227  

Preliminary advice to the UK Government on prioritising people for vaccination: https://www.gov.uk/government/publica...

And this article from Tom Chivers wasn’t written at the time I made this, but it’s also really good, including a deeper dive on the unknowns about the stats: https://unherd.com/2020/11/yes-the-va...