ORANGE PARK, Fla. — "I felt very powerful."
That's how an Orange Park mother doing the Pfizer COVID-19 clinical trial describes her feelings after learning what the pharmaceutical company announced Monday.
Pfizer states out of more than 43,000 participants in the trial, only 94 people contracted the coronavirus, making their vaccine more than 90 percent effective.
Even though there's a lot of excitement around this, doctors warn to not get ahead of ourselves. Pfizer and Biontech only released a press release about their findings, not the actual data.
"It was a little scary at first thinking about being a guinea pig, but it was important to me that somebody has to do it," said Katie Ricks who is doing the clinical trial at the Jacksonville Center for Clinical Research.
More than 1.2 million people have died from the coronavirus worldwide. Ricks has three specific people she is doing the trial for.
"I have a child and my parents are aging and I just wanted to do something that might help all of us get back to a little bit of normal," Ricks said.
It's something doctors also want, but they also say 'not so fast.'
"The way I would put it is very encouraging, but we need to temper our enthusiasm," said Dr. Greg Poland, the Mayo vaccine research group director in Minnesota. "We haven't actually seen the data."
What stands out to Poland is what we don't know about the Pfizer vaccine.
"We don't have longer-term, safety, or efficacy data," he said. "We don't know in what groups or subgroups was this vaccine effective? We don't know about asymptomatic infection."
Another unknown is how the vaccine may work with the strain of the virus changing. This being said, right now it can still be something to be excited about.
"It's moving rapidly, I can assure you of that," said Dr. Michael Koren, research director at the Jacksonville Center for Clinical Research. "It's exciting. There's a sense of optimism in the medical community."
Ricks feels the excitement about the Pfizer vaccine trial news too.
"I felt very powerful," she said. "It gave me something that I was like, 'I helped do that.'"
Ricks doesn't know if she is getting the placebo or the vaccine in the trial, but she thinks she has been getting the vaccine because of some mild symptoms.
"Minor chills and aches but I was good within a day," she said.
Poland says there could be widespread availability of a vaccine by the spring and possibly a vaccine for high-risk groups by the end of the year. Koren says it's also exciting on a scientific level.
"It doesn't involve injecting a virus," Koren said "It involves actually just giving genetic instructions to the body about what to do. So it's very exciting scientifically to have a result and to show that this new way of doing things seems to work."
If you want to take part in a trial at the Jacksonville Center for Clinical Research see how to contact them here.