UK put speed before public confidence in vaccine, says EU agency

The European Medicines Agency has suggested British regulators prioritised speed over winning public confidence to enable the UK to become the first western country to license a coronavirus vaccine.

After it was announced that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine had been authorised for emergency use by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (MHRA), the EU agency issued a statement backing its own “robust” approach.

In a series of media appearances on Wednesday morning, the UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, erroneously claimed that speedy authorisation had been possible “because of Brexit”, contrasting the UK approach with the “pace of the Europeans, who are moving a little bit more slowly”.

The EMA said the bloc’s member states had the option of taking the emergency authorisation route but that its own process was the “appropriate regulatory mechanism for use in the current pandemic emergency, to grant all EU citizens’ access to a vaccine and to underpin mass vaccination campaigns”.

Germany’s health minister, Jens Spahn, said Berlin had also considered the fast-track authorisation chosen by the UK and allowed under EU law, but the task of convincing people of the safety of vaccines was crucial.

“The idea is not that we’re the first, but the idea is to have safe and effective vaccines in the pandemic and that we can create confidence, and nothing is more important than confidence with respect to vaccines,” he said.

Spahn said Germany wanted all European countries to be able to roll out the vaccine at the same time. “We have member states, including Germany, who could have issued such an emergency authorisation if we’d wanted to,” he said. “But we decided against this and what we opted for was a common European approach to move forward together.”

The EMA’s statement said its conditional market authorisation, involving extra checks and evidence gathering, included “essential elements to ensure a high level of protection to citizens during the course of a mass vaccination campaign”.