A Food and Drug Administration panel granted Pfizer an emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine.

The Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee had been meeting for hours before making its decision. It must now be approved by the full FDA.

The panel approval comes amid lingering questions surrounding the vaccine, including the term of immunity and if there are any long-term side effects from it. The FDA insists that the review process has been rigorous.

“The American public demands and deserves a rigorous, comprehensive and independent review of the data. And that's what FDA physicians and scientists -- all of us career public health servants -- have been doing over days, nights, weekends," says Dr. Doran Fink, the agency’s vaccine deputy director.

Pfizer says its vaccine works 95% of the time. So far, it's only resulted in minor side effects.

Among those pushing the hardest for approval are volunteers who tested the vaccine. Evan Fein signed up as a participant at NYU Hospital, and said he “never felt like a guinea pig.”

He told the committee that withholding the vaccine would be “immoral." He was asked if there were any long-term side effects from the vaccine:

“It's been more than five months now since my first shot, and I can happily report that there are none,” he said.

Fein was one of 43,000 people who either got the vaccine or a placebo. Some of them were tested at Clinical Research Consulting in Milford.

But Pfizer still doesn't know about long-term side effects. Doctors asked the FDA how the government will monitor the vaccine for problems.

"It is one big human experiment,” says Kim Witczak, a drug safety advocate. “The only ones that have 100% immunity in this will be the pharmaceutical companies. They get all the benefits of sales without any of the legal liability should something go wrong."

This week, Great Britain warned severely allergic patients to avoid the Pfizer vaccine for now after two patients developed serious reactions. But with COVID-19 cases skyrocketing, the FDA knows that time is running out.

Connecticut is expected to get 31,000 in its first batch.