Coronavirus Latest: Tuesday, October 27

On Tuesday, Pfizer confirmed that it enrolled 42,000 volunteers into its coronavirus vaccine trial. This comes as AstraZeneca says its vaccine demonstrated immune responses among adults and Russia begins production of its second coronavirus vaccine. Yahoo Finance’s Anjalee Khemlani joins The Final Round to discuss the latest on the coronavirus.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: In what has been a chaotic, stressful, and very busy seven months in news related to the pandemic, the last week or so has perhaps been among the busiest that we've seen here in the US during the entire pandemic. For more on everything happening with the coronavirus today, we are joined by Anjalee Khemlani.

So Anjalee, a lot to get to here, and then we will get to some your conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci from yesterday. But there's a lot going on in terms of case counts, news on a vaccine, bullishness around that, concern around what's happening with antibodies and all of that.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Well, I'll just let you take the highlight reel, Myles. Yeah, definitely a lot going on, unfortunately. So with those rising cases, that is really where the crux of the concern remains. We're seeing the daily case count nationwide at the highest it's ever been throughout this pandemic.

And that is the fear that many health experts had, quite honestly. From the beginning, they've been warning that we're going to be seeing what they have dubbed a "twindemic," and that is the flu and the virus coinciding in these colder months where upper respiratory diseases tend to flourish.

So as it stands right now, of course, the focus is on a vaccine. That is the key that everyone is looking at for a return to normal. As it stands right now, Pfizer in the lead with its candidate and looking to have some results by November.

Now that's the third week of November. That is after a change in sort of the guidelines that the FDA had, where rather than giving us the results now and having some sort of interim data on what the vaccine is capable of doing, that has been pushed back now to the third week of November.

It's important to note that the CEO on earnings call today did address that and also was careful to sort of temper expectations, which we haven't seen this whole time. He's been very, you know, very confident and sort of very optimistic. But today, he sort of tempered expectations by saying specifically that he's not bullish on the vaccine in quotes, but he's more cautiously optimistic, borrowing that phrase from Dr. Anthony Fauci.

So that's where that stands right now. Meanwhile, in the treatment space, of course, we've got AstraZeneca back in action with its late stage trial in the US and looking to get some more results, but finding that it does actually have a really good response in both older and younger adults.

And that's a key sort of metric to look at because, as we know, the different vaccine candidates could elicit different responses in different age groups. And that's important to keep an eye on when it comes to what sort of emergency use authorization they might be filing for, as well as where they are approved to be used.

And then now in the-- with the-- sorry-- with the Eli Lilly, the antibody treatment over there, keeping an eye on that, they had to stop their trial when it comes to the hospitalized patients with COVID. But they are going to continue looking at less severe cases for application of antibody treatments.

We know that that has been one of the things that a lot of people are saying are sort of that bridge between vaccines and treatments, and then also offer individuals who can't take vaccines for whatever reason an opportunity to have some kind of prophylactic treatment.

MYLES UDLAND: And all of this, again, coming on the heels of your conversation yesterday with Dr. Anthony Fauci. Wide ranging conversation, made a lot of news there. But one thing you guys also discussed, as this kind of segment has been focused on, is, what a vaccine-- I guess, what it means to him in the context of treating the virus and ending the pandemic. Not eradicating the virus or the disease, but in ending the pandemic.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Right, and so this goes back to one of the basic foundations of vaccines. And it's commonly misunderstood because you think that when you have a vaccine, that means you're entirely immune to the disease. And that is not true in a lot of cases. As we've seen with the flu every year, you're still susceptible, even if you do, in fact, get that vaccine. For various reasons, you're still able to get the disease.

Now, looking at coronavirus, there's still so little known about it. But what health experts have said is that it's likely that, you know, because the primary endpoint has been set by the FDA to meet the mark of at least preventing more severe illness, that's what everyone is looking at.

That's what the vaccines will offer, is just prevention against the symptoms coming on. So listen to what he has to say and how he sort of explained it, but it really goes into what we should be expecting from the vaccine moving forward.

ANTHONY FAUCI: And that's the primary endpoint of most of the virus, is to prevent clinical disease, to prevent symptomatic disease, not necessarily to prevent infection. That's a secondary endpoint. But the primary thing you want to do is that if people get infected, prevent them from getting sick. And if you prevent them from getting sick, you will ultimately prevent them from getting seriously ill. So that's what we want to do. The first point, which we call a primary endpoint, is that.

If the vaccine also allows you to prevent initial infection, that would be great. But what I would settle for, and all of my colleagues would settle for, is the primary endpoint to prevent clinically recognizable disease. And that's what we hope happens. And if we do, that will go a long way to diffusing this very difficult crisis that we're in.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: So as you can hear, that's really the goal, is to prevent that sickness. And that's why he and other experts have been saying that even when a vaccine does come out, because it will take time to make sure that a large portion of the population is vaccinated and therefore provides that herd immunity, the social distancing measures and other mitigation practices will still need to be in effect for a good majority of the year next year.