AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine may have to wait for EU’s approval

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has maintained that it is unlikely to give a nod to AstraZeneca and Oxford University’s Covid-19 vaccine in January 2021, CGTN reported.

The EMA’s deputy executive director Noel Wathion told Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad that the pharmaceutical company “has not even filed an application” with the European drug regulators yet.

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He further said that EMA “did not even have enough to warrant a conditional marketing license.”

EMA needs more data on the vaccine quality and after that, the vaccine producers can formally apply for approval. This makes it “improbable” to get the approval as early as next month.

This comes as last week the pharmaceutical company has assured people that the vaccine should be able to provide “100 per cent protection” even against the new variant that has sprouted in the United Kingdom, as per earlier reports.

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Meanwhile, the UK is expected to approve the vaccine soon. On this news, Wathion said, “We’re in the dark because we don’t know what data AstraZeneca has submitted to the British authorities.”

He added, “But it could well be that the British agency is granting a provisional authorization. We don't do that, because the company first needs to demonstrate that all vaccines will be of high quality.”