With Pfizer and BioNTech announcing they are filing their COVID-19 vaccine for emergency clearance by the Food and Drug Administration on Friday, many are wondering what happens next and is the vaccine safe?

"This means we have two vaccines that are highly effective at preventing new infections, about 95 percent effective, so that's really exciting," said Dr. Eli Rosenberg, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University at Albany. 

It's exciting news for scientists and researchers as COVID-19 cases are spiking again across the country, averaging about 200,000 new cases each day. While Friday's announcement means some doses of the vaccine could be available as soon as December, you may not be able to get yours for some time. 

"Pfizer, particularly because of its deep, cold-storage requirement, is developing its own supply network to help distribute those vaccines,” Rosenberg said.

Moderna, which also announced its 95 percent efficacy rate earlier in the week, didn't announce it would file on Friday, but Rosenberg says, their processes to get up to scale when they are FDA approved might be a little different, since they're part of "Operation Warp Speed," while Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine was not government funded.

"I think having complementary approaches, given that both companies have a limited ability to produce right now, having multiple vaccines on the market is going to help us get to our goals faster," Rosenberg said.

But that goal can't be reached without people actually being willing to take the vaccine and they'll need two doses of it. There is wide-reaching skepticism across the U.S. about whether pharmaceutical makers are fudging the numbers, but Rosenberg says the vaccines are similar and it shouldn't be surprising they would share an efficacy rate.

"It is important to remember that the approaches of both vaccines are actually very similar, they're both what we call mRNA [messenger RNA] vaccines and what it's doing is sort of convincing some of your body's cell to create tiny particles of the virus, not the virus itself just like, one particle, to train your immune system how to respond to the virus," Rosenberg said.

The other skepticism is about how quickly the vaccine was created and phased through trials, and while Rosenberg says there is less safety data than there is traditionally, there are independent scientists reviewing the vaccines before they become available to the public.

"Some people might view it as, 'Well, we're cutting corners on safety,' but on the other hand the urgency of the moment really does speak to the need to find ways to creatively speed up that process," Dr. Rosenberg said.

Don't expect your life to immediately change when the vaccines are widely distributed and don't change what you're doing right now, just because of this news. Rosenberg says while individual vaccine recipients will have greater immunity, larger communities must have access to it too, which he says could take all of next year.

"We are still facing many months of sort of the situation we have now," Rosenberg said. "So what that means is we need to have a continuation of the practices that work -- masks, social distancing and really just maintaining this low profile that we all should be taking."

In addition to the regulatory processes at the federal level, Rosenberg says New York's task force, which includes a branch of independent review of the vaccine's safety and efficacy and also a distribution branch, is vital to ensuring communities across the state feel safe taking this vaccine and getting the state on track to reducing the number of new infections.