Coronavirus: why it’s a mistake to depend on a single vaccine to stop the pandemic

Governments should work with a mix of different vaccines against coronavirus have the best chance of ending the pandemicsaid the head of the European medicines regulator, warning that relying too much on one injection or one type of vaccine could be counterproductive.

“We’re going to need a wallet of vaccines -one thing we’ve learned from this pandemic is that once you start making predictions, something else always happens, “he said. Emer cooke, executive director of the European Medicines Agency (EMA, by its silgas in English), at Financial Time. “You may have a production problem, something else may go wrong, the best approach is a portfolio approach“.

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Cooke’s comments come at a time when many high-income countries have turned away from adenoviral vector vaccines developped by Oxford / AstraZeneca Yes Johnson & johnson, after a relationship was observed between the vaccination and one rare type of blood clot. Instead, several countries, including the Unin Europea (EU) and United States, they prefer innovation mRNA vaccines developped by Pfizer-BioNTech Yes Modern. Last month, the EU signed an agreement to purchase an additional 1.8 billion doses of vaccine from Pfizer for 2022 and 2023.

Cooke, Irish pharmacist and veteran of the EMA, who returned to the agency last November after four years in the World Health Organization, described eight difficult months for the regulator.

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With the world desperate to find a way out pandemic, the agency faced “strong pressure” last year to speed up the approval of vaccines against Covid-19 they had sped up the rehearsals in record time.

“You see the results coming, they look good, and people want to know if it’s really true, if it’s not,” he said. “To be able to validate the information, really evaluate scientific information in the fastest time we have done it, creates its own pressure.

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But he insisted that the EMA has always maintained its independence: “The regulatory function is an independent scientific function, it must be distinct from political processes, otherwise I won’t be able to go to bed at night. “

The vaccination race people also meant that some of the vaccine producers these were new players with less experience in dealing with regulators. “All businesses have their good and bad sides. Some are more accustomed than others to dealing with EMA and that makes a difference, ”he said.

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He did not want to say if the European governments were too quick or slow to respond to the problem cogulos sanguneos which was associated for the first time with the youngest recipients of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The role of EMA is to understand and assess the risks, he stressed, while using the vaccines at local level, it is a decision of each Member State.

Cooke added that the agency is still investigating the AstraZeneca vaccine to determine if he needs to update his guidelines on who to get the injection, with further results expected in September. The current council of the EMA is that the advantages of vaccine outweigh their risks in all adult age groups, but many countries have already limited its use to older patients only.

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“When these things are really rare, the problem is that there is nothing that can immediately say that ‘if you have this [condicin o problema subyacente], avoid one vaccine or some other, “he said.” We’re not there; I wish I was there. “

Cooke strongly objected to any suggestion that further examination of the EMA on the vaccine AstraZeneca politically motivated, especially after a fight earlier in the year between London Yes Brussels on the supply of vaccine. “It’s easy to criticize EMA because we don’t have a face, “he said.” It’s a lot easier to criticize something you don’t know than something you know.

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Collaboration with international regulatory bodies, including the UK Medicines and Health Products Regulatory Agency and the Food and drug administration of United States, has been positive, he said, also in terms of blood clot, which, he said, was first unveiled in Europe.

Cooke did not want to say if he supported the vaccine patent release against the coronavirus, supported by EE.UU. but to which the EU, and he just said he wished there was a lot more vaccine manufacturing in developed countries.

“Manufacturing is not easy,” he said. “People underestimate the time and effort it takes to run a production facility to vaccines and that it operates according to international standards. “