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A UK MINISTER has said the UK is getting a coronavirus vaccine first because it is a “much better country” than France, Belgium and the US.
Education Secretary Gavin Williamson praised the work done by the medical regulator to approve the use of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine.
He said the Medicines and Health Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has “brilliant” experts.
The European regulator has criticized the approval of the vaccine using emergency powers, insisting that its own slower approach is more appropriate.
Williamson said the UK’s status as the first country to approve a vaccine is due to its top experts.
“I think we have the best people in this country and obviously we have the best medical regulator, much better than the French, much better than the Belgians, much better than the Americans,” he said. LBC radio.
“That doesn’t surprise me because we are a much better country than each and every one of them.”
However, unlike Health Secretary Matt Hancock, Williamson did not suggest that Brexit had contributed directly.
“I think just being able to get on with things, deliver it, and have the brilliant people at our medical regulator make it happen means that people in this country will be the first in the Western world to get the Pfizer vaccine,” he said. said.
“A real competitive advantage, but do you know who owns it?
“It’s up to those brilliant, brilliant doctors in the regulator who have made this happen so quickly, so our thanks go out to them because by doing what they have done, they are going to have saved lives.”
European Commission spokesman Eric Mamer said the MHRA experts are “very good”, but “we are definitely not in the game of comparing regulators between countries, or commenting on claims of who is better.”
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“This is not a football competition, we are talking about people’s lives and health,” he said.
On Tuesday, Hancock suggested that Brexit had allowed the UK to move faster with the vaccine, a claim disputed by the MHRA and the EU.
MHRA Director June Raine said that it is still subject to EU law until the end of the year and that “our progress has been totally dependent on the availability of data in our ongoing review and the independent advice we have received.”
The EMA suggested that it is imposing stricter controls than the emergency process used by the MHRA.
The EMA believes that its conditional marketing authorization (CMA) process is “the most appropriate regulatory mechanism for use in the current pandemic emergency.”
A CMA application is backed by “extensive data” submitted by companies and “provides a robust, controlled framework.”
Dr Berkeley Phillips, Pfizer UK Chief Medical Officer, likened the process to a book, with the necessary chapters written but not yet fully bound into a full paper.
He told reporters: “In an emergency situation, the MHRA has effectively said ‘We can see what we need to see in those chapters of this book, the book has yet to be written in its entirety, but given the crisis, we are in, we have seen enough to be sure to give this emergency clearance. ‘
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