Biography | Albert Bourla — The Midtown Release That Put an mRNA Shot Over 90 Percent

The first public efficacy number did not come from a regulator's podium.

It came in a press release dated 9 November 2020, issued jointly from New York and Mainz.

Pfizer and BioNTech said their mRNA candidate, BNT162b2, had cleared the first interim analysis of the Phase 3 study.

An external data monitoring committee had looked at 94 confirmed cases.

The split implied efficacy above 90 percent in people with no prior evidence of infection, measured seven days after the second dose.

The company's own release, timed 6:45 a.m., is the primary text.

The Associated Press and Scientific American carried the same figures the same day.

The trial had enrolled 43,538 participants.

No serious safety signal had been flagged in that interim look.

The firms said they would seek U.S. emergency use authorization after a safety milestone expected later in November.

Headquarters on the New York side of the letterhead was still 235 East 42nd Street.

Bourla had been chief executive for ten months and chairman for less than a year.

The release is a corporate announcement, not a peer-reviewed paper.

The full data set was still being collected toward a planned final analysis at 164 cases.

FDA emergency authorization followed on 11 December 2020.

The first U.S. finishing lots left the Portage, Michigan plant two days after that.

This pin is the midtown tower that signed the New York half of the 9 November letter, not the Michigan line and not Mainz.

The entrance photograph is from 2016, four years before the release. The portrait is a 2021 World Economic Forum still.

Photo: entrance, Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: World Economic Forum, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.