Are Pfizer and Comirnaty the same? What to know about COVID vaccine name change
The recent approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine means more than just enticing some previously hesitant people to roll up their sleeves.
The upgrade from an emergency use authorization also means the developers are now allowed to market their product to the public via television, print and radio advertisements.
“They’re going to be everywhere,” Markus Saba, a health care marketing professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, told AdAge. “It’s the single biggest health issue in the last 100 years and Pfizer is on the cutting edge — you don’t hold back a single thing.”
And when you have something to promote, you need a brand name. That’s where “Comirnaty” (pronounced koe-mir’-na-tee) comes in. The shot has been called the “Pfizer vaccine” because that’s the name of one of the companies that developed it.
However, the name change led some people to believe the Food and Drug Administration-approved Comirnaty is a different version of the Pfizer vaccine — it’s not.
Comirnaty has “the same formulation” as the Pfizer vaccine, according to the FDA.
Yet, you may still hear the phrase “Pfizer vaccine” floating around. That’s because the shot is still under an EUA for children between 12 and 15 years old. The FDA approval only covered people aged 16 and older.
The nuance explains why the FDA says the licensed Comirnaty vaccine “can be used interchangeably” with the unlicensed Pfizer shot.
The vaccine is still under an EUA for the administration of third doses for certain immunocompromised individuals as well. Both the Johnson & Johnson and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines still await full FDA approval but remain available for adults under an EUA.
The new brand name “is coined from Covid-19 immunity, and then embeds the mRNA in the middle, which is the platform technology, and as a whole the name is meant to evoke the word community,” Scott Piergrossi, president of operations and communications of the Brand Institute, a branding agency that specializes in the development of brand names and identities, told Fierce Pharma in December.
More than 171.7 million Americans are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as of Aug. 25 — about 52% of the total population, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracker. About 206.2 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine have been administered.
This story was originally published August 26, 2021 at 11:58 AM with the headline "Are Pfizer and Comirnaty the same? What to know about COVID vaccine name change."
