LONDON (UK) – Anthony Fauci, the key US infectious diseases expert, tendered an apology on Thursday for doubting the rigour of the British regulators who gave the nod for the Pfizer Inc vaccine against novel coronavirus, saying he trusted the quality of their work.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority said on Wednesday that it had approved the vaccine on Wednesday after rigorously assessing its data and had cut no corners.
This gave the country a jump in the race for a shot against the virus which has claimed the lives of nearly 1.5 million people around the world.
Fauci hinted in a CBS interview on Thursday that regulators did not scrutinise the data carefully and this was reported on TV news channels.
Later, in an interview with the BBC, he said his comments had come out wrong.
“There really has been a misunderstanding, and for that I’m sorry, and I apologise for that,” he said. “I do have great faith in both the scientific community and the regulatory community in the UK,” Fauci said.
“I did not mean to apply any sloppiness (to the UK regulatory process), even though it came out that way,” he added.
The health expert said that he was trying to point out that in the American context, where there is rampant vaccine scepticism, it would have been inappropriate to carry out the process in the same manner in which the UK did it.
“If we had for example approved it yesterday or tomorrow, there likely would have been pushback on an already scrutinising society,” he said.
“You know, at the end of the day, it’s going to be safe, it’s going to be effective, the people in the UK are going to receive it and they’re going to do really well, and the people in the United States are going to receive it and we’re going to do pretty well,” Fauci said.
Following, Fauci’s earlier interview, the MHRA came out with a statement saying, it had “rigorously assessed the data in the shortest time possible without compromising the thoroughness of our review”.
It also said its emergency approval had permitted “some stages of this process to happen in parallel to condense the time needed, but it does not mean steps and the expected standards of safety, quality and effectiveness have been bypassed”.
