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LONDON (Reuters) – America’s leading infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci apologized on Thursday for questioning the rigor of British regulators who approved Pfizer Inc’s COVID-19 vaccine, saying he had faith in the quality of their work.
Britain announced approval of the vaccine on Wednesday, and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said it had rigorously evaluated the vaccine’s data and spared no effort.
It gave the UK the leap in the race to begin mass inoculation against a virus that has killed nearly 1.5 million people worldwide and hit the global economy. Regulators in the US and the European Union are examining the same test data for the Pfizer vaccine, but have not yet given approval.
In a CBS interview on Thursday, Fauci suggested that British regulators had not analyzed the data carefully enough and had passed up the vaccine, comments that were prominently reported on major British television news channels.
He later gave an interview to the BBC in which he said his previous comments had gone wrong.
“There really has been a misunderstanding, and for that I am sorry, and I apologize for that,” he said. “I have great faith in both the scientific community and the UK regulatory community,” Fauci said.
“I didn’t want to apply any oversight (to the UK regulatory process), although it came out that way,” he added.
Fauci said the point he had been trying to make was that in the American context, with widespread skepticism about vaccines, it would not have been appropriate to carry out the process in the same way and at the same speed that happened in Britain.
“If, for example, we had approved it yesterday or tomorrow, there would probably have been a setback in a society that it was already scrutinizing,” he said.
“You know, at the end of the day, it will be safe, it will be effective, people in the UK will receive it and it will do very well, and people in the United States are going to receive it and we are going to do quite well,” said Fauci .
In response to its earlier criticism, the MHRA issued a statement saying it had “rigorously evaluated the data in the shortest amount of time possible without compromising the thoroughness of our review.”
The regulator also said that its emergency approval had allowed “some stages of this process to happen in parallel to condense the necessary time, but it does not mean that the steps and the expected standards of safety, quality and effectiveness have been overlooked.”
Fauci is the most prominent member of the White House coronavirus task force and has often clashed with President Donald Trump on how to protect Americans from the virus, which has caused about 273,000 deaths in the United States.
President-elect Joe Biden said Thursday that he had asked Fauci to be the top medical adviser for his COVID-19 team when he takes office on January 20. [nW1N2HQ0GG]
(Reporting by Estelle Shirbon; Editing by Bill Berkrot and Peter Cooney)
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