UK company boss Ben Osborn also told the newspaper that scientists at his main UK lab have also come to light on drugs that may provide a full cure for Covid-19, as opposed to just a preventative vaccine.
Osborn said the company was manufacturing the huge stockpile of its current vaccine candidate in Belgium “at risk and on a large scale”, calling it “extremely exciting”.
“The hope here is that we essentially find a drug that disrupts the virus and ultimately prevents it from making a patient’s condition worse,” he told the Mail’s financial site This is Money.
“It was great to see the first bottle roll off the production line. It just gave me a great smile to see all of this work culminating in a product, ”he said.
But “we cannot go as fast as science allows us,” he stressed.
Pfizer expects to know whether or not the vaccine will work by the end of the month, but the company has yet to prove that the vaccine is safe and can be made properly to get a so-called emergency use authorization, CEO Albert Bourla said on Friday.
If he’s safe, he expects his company to seek emergency use in the United States in the third week of November.
“We are operating at the speed of science,” he said.