London’s primacy over the vaccine is a political movement born of Brexit

The United Kingdom crosses the line in the race to authorize the coronavirus vaccine among Western countries, and the news can only take (also) political and geopolitical contours. Political because the primacy of London was immediately claimed as a success by the much-criticized government of Boris Johnson, and geopolitical because that primacy is the result of the process of disengagement from European rules and customs that bears the name of Brexit.

In fact, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, the British drug agency, granted an emergency authorization to the vaccine developed by Pfizer-Biontech, which was able to do so thanks to a rule of European legislation invoked by the British government in the end. . November that allows national regulators, in case of emergency, to advance independently of the European Medicines Agency (Ema). This is how London has managed to beat both Washington and Brussels, with which it will also have to interact to avoid delays in the supply machinery. As the Financial Times points out, in fact much of the UK supply will be produced at Pfizer’s plants in Puurs, Belgium. To date, a trade deal on Brexit has yet to be signed, and the end of the transitional arrangements risks disrupting or delaying supply chains by the end of the year.

The cold reaction of the European authorities confirms that what is at stake is above all political. “The EMA considers that conditional authorization is the most appropriate mechanism in this pandemic emergency” since “based on more evidence”, is the lapidary comment of the European Agency, transferred from London to Amsterdam on the occasion of Brexit.

For London, however, the time factor is a pin that is pinned to the chest. “The vaccine will start to be available in the UK from next week,” Johnson tweeted, hailing the “fantastic” news. “It is the protection of vaccination that will finally allow us to get our lives back and get the economy moving again.”

British Health Minister Matt Hancock has openly linked the British leadership to Brexit. “First of all – he said in an interview with Times Radio – we must give credit to the great work done by Mhra with the manufacturing company to evaluate the data (on the experimentation) as it arrived and to proceed with the verifications in parallel. instead of one passage after another as it usually happens ”. “Secondly” – Hancock continued – we must consider that “due to Brexit we are no longer linked to the European agency, EMA, and we can make a decision based on the green light of our national regulatory authority”. a world-class regulator, not at the pace of Europeans who go a little slower ”. “We,” said the minister, “carry out the same security checks and go through the same procedures, but thanks to Brexit we have been able to accelerate” times with respect to the EU.

For Johnson, the launch could offer political breathing space after eight months of criticism for his handling of the pandemic, which has killed nearly 60,000 people in the country. “Next year we will have a summer that we can all enjoy,” promised his Minister of Health. But first the government will have to distribute the doses efficiently throughout the country. The challenge is huge for everyone and the UK is no exception, especially as, as Bloomberg points out again, the lack of fragmented logistics is one of the most cited reasons for explaining the record of British casualties in Europe (on the Old Continent, the first country for the number of deaths is the United Kingdom, followed by Italy and France).

For Guido Rasi, former executive director of the European Medicines Agency, the British government’s move appears to be a “substantially political” step and “irrelevant to EMA procedures”. It is “an emergency authorization to extend the use of the batch currently available for clinical trials to the general population,” said the Italian who led the Authority twice, the last since 2015 in mid-November. “The London approval comes a few days after the likely EMA approval and includes all quality aspects for mass distribution,” Rasi noted, according to whom “a reasonable little additional risk was assumed abroad”: “if only you evaluate partial data, as they are doing, you also run a minimal risk “-” but only of political value.

Certainly the acceleration, already anticipated in recent days, also aims to revitalize a British pride put to the test by the pandemic and the convulsive European divorce. By doing so, the UK can say that it is the first country in which no question of ethical and scientific correctness is weighed when starting a coronavirus vaccination campaign. China has authorized its three favorites for emergency use. Russia licensed a vaccine known as Sputnik V in August, while a second inoculation was approved in October, although the last phase of testing to establish safety and efficacy is still ongoing. The scientific community has repeatedly expressed its perplexity at the initiatives of both countries and their ramifications abroad.

For the UK, which is suffering one of the worst collapses among advanced nations this year, the vaccine could also be a game changer. Bloomberg Economics expects Britain’s gross domestic product to decline by 11.4% this year, the deepest contraction in 300 years, followed by 6% growth in 2021.

The UK will still need more vaccines to reach the milestone of mass immunization. The country has ordered enough doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech product (which requires two inoculations) to vaccinate 20 million people, less than a third of the population. The two drug companies said they could produce 1.3 billion doses next year, but much of that supply has already been the subject of deals to ship hundreds of millions of doses to Europe, the United States, Japan and elsewhere. London has crossed the line with approval, but mass immunization will be a long marathon.