the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, according to Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security , the US FDA announced that its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will convene on December 10 to review the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) requests submitted by Pfizer and BioNTech for their candidate SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn emphasized that while the advisory board “will review the request as expeditiously as possible,” it is unclear how long the review process will take. That being said, this represents another major step toward authorization for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. The FDA intends to livestream the meeting via its YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter accounts as well as from the FDA website.
In last week’s press release announcing that Pfizer and BioNTech submitted the EUA request, the companies commented that they would be ready to begin distributing the first doses of the vaccine “within hours after authorization.” Dr. Moncef Slaoui, Operation Warp Speed’s chief scientific advisor, reportedly expects the FDA to grant the first vaccine EUA in mid-December, and in an interview with Wired, US NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said that he expects the US to be able to fully vaccinate (ie, both doses) 20 million people by the end of December.