Yahoo Finance European and US experts question UK's fast-track of Covid vaccine
Politicians, health professionals and commentators in Europe and the US have questioned Britain’s decision to fast-track approval of a coronavirus vaccine and criticised what some saw as the jingoistic tone of its announcement.
The UK on Wednesday became the first country in the world to approve a Covid-19 vaccine when the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) granted the Pfizer/BioNTech shot emergency authorisation for clinical use.
But several countries have suggested a longer and more thorough regulatory process may prove preferable, arguing that more time scrutinising trial data fully will minimise risk and increase public confidence in the vaccine’s safety.
Germany’s health minister, Jens Spahn, said that while he expected a quick decision by the EU’s medical regulator, the Amsterdam-based European Medicines Agency (EMA), there was a distinct difference between the approach Britain had adopted – limited emergency approval – and what Germany was looking for.
“We could have chosen that way too, but we consciously decided against it,” Spahn said. The EMA approval process, expected to be completed by the end of the month, was a “more comprehensive one” and was necessary “in order to strengthen citizens’ confidence in the vaccine”, he said, adding that a short delay between approval in the UK and the rest of Europe was “not so dramatic”.
In Spain, César Hernández, the head of the department of human use medicines at the national agency for medicines and health products, said he thought other countries in Europe were unlikely to follow Britain’s lead.
“In a situation which, epidemiologically speaking, doesn’t appear to be getting worse, there has to be a very big potential benefit to outweigh the risk of bringing forward vaccination by a week or two,” Hernández told El País.
“All decisions on medicines are made on those grounds. You can accept a really big risk if you’re going to see a benefit that outweighs it. Similarly, you can accept a small benefit if there’s zero risk. But here the risk is uncertain and, given there are just two weeks to go before full authorisation, that risk doesn’t seem very justified.”
In France, Bruno Lina, a virologist and member of the French government’s scientific advisory council, said Britain’s move was “a political decision”. But he added it would be “difficult to organise a mass vaccination campaign quickly. The British have taken a certain risk.”
The Pfizer/BioNTech Covid jab is an mRNA vaccine. Essentially, mRNA is a molecule used by living cells to turn the gene sequences in DNA into the proteins that are the building blocks of all their fundamental structures. A segment of DNA gets copied (“transcribed”) into a piece of mRNA, which in turn gets “read” by the cell’s tools for synthesising proteins.
In the case of an mRNA vaccine, the virus’s mRNA is injected into the muscle, and our own cells then read it and synthesise the viral protein. The immune system reacts to these proteins – which can’t by themselves cause disease – just as if they’d been carried in on the whole virus. This generates a protective response that, studies suggest, lasts for some time.
The two first Covid-19 vaccines to announce phase 3 three trial results were mRNA-based. They were first off the blocks because, as soon as the genetic code of Sars-CoV-2 was known – it was published by the Chinese in January 2020 – companies that had been working on this technology were able to start producing the virus’s mRNA. Making conventional vaccines takes much longer.
Adam Finn, professor of paediatrics at the Bristol Children’s Vaccine Centre, University of Bristol
He said a delay of two or three weeks would “not make a big difference. It’s better to wait a bit longer to be sure we can carry out our vaccination programme in the best possible conditions.” But it would be “interesting to see how Britain fares”, he said.
Another French virologist, Yazdan Yazdanpanah, told French radio: “It is not because they are going to start next week that they will do better than the rest. I think we have to take time to look properly at all the data.”
French experts also suggested the UK’s relatively low level of vaccine hesitancy when compared with many European countries may have encouraged the government to move faster, since emergency authorisation was less likely to prejudice the success of the vaccination programme.
In the US, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the way the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was proceeding was “the correct way” and the UK “did not do it as carefully”.
Fauci told Fox News that the FDA “really scrutinises the data very carefully to guarantee to the American public that this is a safe and efficacious vaccine. I think if we did any less, we would add to the already existing hesitancy on the part of many people because … they’re concerned that we went too quickly.”
Commentators were more forthright. The Badische Zeitung newspaper in Germany accused the UK government of using the vaccine to act out “its political games”, and called it “frivolous” for doing so. “The British government has started a competition for the fastest approval while striking a nationalist triumphal pose,” it said.
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It was “rather odd” to present speedy clinical approval as a result of the UK’s independence from “the supposedly ‘slow’ EU authorities”, the Reutliner General-Anzeiger newspaper said in an editorial. “The vaccine has come about precisely due to the success of international cooperation.”
The Volksstimme newspaper said Britain was “taking a big risk” and that if anything went wrong, Boris Johnson and his government “can pack their bags”.
Criticism for what he referred to as Britain’s “rushing ahead” also came from Peter Liese, a German MEP and doctor. “I consider this decision to be problematic and would urge the EU member states not to copy it,” Liese said. He added that the EMA should be given “all the time it needed to check the vaccine, on which tests are still being carried out, particularly on any possible long-term side-effects”.
Spain’s El Mundo noted that the UK’s health secretary, Matt Hancock, had “in his triumphant remarks” forgotten to mention that London used to be the seat of the EMA before its post-Brexit relocation to Amsterdam.
“Nor did [Hancock] mention that the health agencies of each EU member country can – in the case of exceptional health emergencies – make their own decisions,” the paper said. “If no country has chosen to do so, it has been out of respect for the ‘joint action’ policy on Covid, which is independent of the individual measures taken against the pandemic at a national level.”
