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Last Sunday, the United States reported its 10 millionth case of the coronavirus, with the last million added in the preceding 10 days. Covid-19 hospitalizations hit a new high this week, and new daily cases passed 160,000 for the first time on Thursday. Throughout the pandemic, the science and health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. has been at the forefront of The New York Times’s coverage and was recently awarded the 2020 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism by the Columbia Journalism School. In this edited interview, he talked about the new wave of infections.

There’s a lot of optimism around Pfizer’s announcement on Monday, which suggested its mRNA-based vaccine could be more than 90 percent effective. What should we make of this? Is it too soon to rejoice?

No, I’d say a little rejoicing is in order. The F.D.A. has said it would accept a vaccine that was only 50 percent effective, which is worse than some year’s flu shots, so everyone’s expectations were lowered. This is pretty great. Plus, we were already pretty sure that mRNA vaccines would be harmless. With this type of vaccine, you’re injecting just a short stretch of the virus’s genome packed into a tiny ball of fat with a mild electric charge. In contrast, some vaccines use a whole virus that is killed or weakened and is more likely to cause bad reactions.

Pfizer actually said its vaccine is at least 90 percent effective. We need to be cautious: That was its news release, rather than the actual data, which scientists will want to examine. But I’ve read previous news releases from Big Pharma companies and compared them to the data issued later, and they’ve been honest.