Republicans outperformed the polls up and down the ballot in the 2020 election, to the surprise even of many Republican political operatives and survey researchers.
To be clear, Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Trump; Democrats will still control the House and still have a chance of picking up the Senate.
On Monday, the pharma giant and its German partner BioNTech announced that their vaccine was found to be more than 90% effective, based on 94 cases of the disease observed in an interim analysis.
But Pfizer's vaccine requires two doses to achieve that high effectiveness. The two shots are administered three weeks apart. In July, Pfizer said its researchers observed the highest level of virus-neutralizing antibodies one week after the participants' second dose.
The U.S. hit a record number of coronavirus hospitalizations Tuesday and surpassed 1 million new confirmed cases in just the first 10 days of November amid a nationwide surge of infections that shows no signs of slowing.
The new wave appears bigger and more widespread than the surges that happened in the spring and summer — and threatens to be worse. But experts say there are also reasons to think the nation is better able to deal with the virus this time around.