wo years ago, Pfizer anticipated that sales of its rebound-prone COVID-19 oral antiviral Paxlovid and fully approved mRNA COVID vaccine Comirnaty would plummet, but good news appeared on the horizon: The drugmaker’s mRNA flu vaccine did well in phase 3 trials in ages 18-64, and Pfizer expected to release results from the 65-and-up cohort “later this year.”
The results are finally in: Compared to a standard flu shot, the mRNA vaccine was associated with six times as many adverse events as infections prevented in adults under 65, and it outright failed in elderly people, associated with more deaths and both minor and serious injuries, from injection-site swelling to kidney problems.
The company buried the long-delayed elderly results on the government’s clinical trials website this spring, more than a year late and without announcing them to the public or investors, and gave an optimistic take on the under-65 results in the New England Journal of Medicine last week, while admitting the mRNA shot was “associated with more reactogenicity events.”
Australian and American drug industry journalists dug into the two arms of the trial, predicting mRNA jabs for flu would face an uphill climb with Trump administration regulators, who have already canceled nearly $500 million in federal projects and contracts that went toward mRNA vaccine development.
Pfizer used the same testing structure for mRNA flu shots as for its COVID shots and still found only an absolute difference of 0.32% for under-65s, requiring vaccination by 300 people to “prevent a single mild, self-limiting illness,” physician-turned-investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi wrote in an X thread summarizing her deep-dive review.
“Put simply, it’s a manufacturer-funded trial, written largely by Pfizer employees & finds its best efficacy in the endpoint that requires all samples to be shipped to a Pfizer-run central lab for adjudication,” Demasi said.
Hellbound and Down 