U.K. and U.S. officials spar over ‘vaccine nationalism’
LONDON — British and U.S. officials sparred Thursday over how Britain had beaten the United States to authorizing a coronavirus vaccine, a debate touching on politics and regulatory styles that has heated up as wealthy countries vie to receive the first shipments of vaccines.
In Britain, the euphoria of winning the global race to authorizing the PfizerBioNTech vaccine was quickly giving way to a more sober realization of the choices facing the country’s National Health Service as it tries to deliver the first doses into people’s arms by Monday.
Nursing home residents, who had been named the government’s top priority, have fallen down the list. Doctors and nurses were expecting to be vaccinated first, but those plans appeared to be in flux. Meanwhile, the government pleaded with people not to call hospitals to ask for a shot.
The question of whether Britain had authorized a vaccine in haste on Wednesday, or the United States was wasting valuable time as the virus was killing about 1,500 Americans a day, has divided scientists and has also drawn in politicians. Facing criticism from U.S. and European regulators, British officials on Thursday boasted of the decision, with one lawmaker suggesting the Europeans were “a bit sniffy” and others misleadingly crediting Brexit.
“We’ve obviously got the best medical regulators,” Gavin Williamson, Britain’s education secretary, said in a radio interview, by way of explaining why Britain had become the first Western country to authorize a vaccine. “Much better than the French have, much better than the Belgians have, much better than the Americans have. That doesn’t surprise me at all because we’re a much better country than every single one of them, aren’t we.”
Those remarks drew eye rolls from British scientists, but also provoked more serious concerns that any chest-beating by government ministers risked undermining the public’s faith in a vaccine.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that British regulators had not scrutinized data from clinical trials as carefully as their American counterparts in the Food and Drug Administration.
“We have the gold standard of a regulatory approach with the FDA,” Fauci said in an interview on Fox News. “The U.K. did not do it as carefully, and they got a couple of days ahead.”
Approval could come as early as next week from the FDA, and at the end of the month from European Union regulators.
Pro-Brexit lawmakers in Britain have incorrectly cast Britain’s split with the European Union as the reason it authorized a vaccine first. In fact, Britain remains under the bloc’s regulatory umbrella until Dec. 31 when it comes to drug and vaccine approvals, but was able to move more quickly because of European regulations enabling countries to act independently in public health emergencies.
While as a political matter, Brexit may have made it easier for Britain to authorize the vaccine early, analysts said, the divorce has made the job of its medical regulators more difficult in other ways.
And the flag-waving of pro-Brexit lawmakers was doing little to engender public trust in vaccines, scientists said.
“Vaccine nationalism has no place in COVID or other public health matters of global significance,” said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and a scientific adviser to the British government. “Science has always been the exit strategy from this horrendous pandemic — that science has been global.”
With the first inoculations just a few days away, Britons were parsing the government’s shifting and sometimes vague statements about who would get the vaccine and when.
A government advisory committee had recommended that nursing home residents and workers be first in line for the vaccine, to prevent suffering and deaths among the most vulnerable and to protect the country’s overburdened hospitals as they deal with a second wave of infections. More than a quarter of coronavirus deaths in England and Wales have happened in nursing homes.
But Prime Minister Boris Johnson said this week that the Pfizer vaccine, owing to its ultracold storage needs, would only be administered in hospitals for the time being, ruling out nursing home residents as the first recipients.