There is no reason to stop the trial early I’m assuming they are limited by production capacity anyway so whenever it’s done they will just launch with more doses. That being said it’s 3+ months out and will only be available to high risk folks And rich people initially
Obviously I'm armchair quarterbacking like every other asshole on the internet. Even if it were warranted by the data, I'm not sure it would make any sense to stop the trial early, since they'll apparently be at their target number within the next few weeks. I think distribution will be a mess, but the government has already paid for 100,000,000 doses, so I very much hope that (a) Pfizer showed them data to make then confident that 100M could be produced quickly, and (b) that the gov't has been considering a distribution plan. Given the past 9 months of chaos, I have little faith in either of those propositions. I wonder to what extent the defense production act can be used to make every available company start producing vaccine. Hopefully Trump can be sidelined for the next two months to make sure that he can't be disruptive to the process, whatever it turns out to be.
Just an update, I read that they are planning to submit an emergency authorization in the 3rd week of this month, which is like next week, I guess. Then they say they have the capacity to produce 30-40M doses by year's end (15-20M patients worth, since everyone needs two). Their target estimate is 1.2 billion (600M patients) per year, which obviously isn't enough for the world's appetite, so hopefully some other vaccine works out, too. Hopefully their success portends the success of others, too, since it's all the same biology.