Pfizer vaccine: Why is Europe going to vaccinate a month later than the UK?

The UK will start vaccinating almost a month ahead of European Union countries. Will use the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, of which he ordered 40 million doses, enough to immunize 20 million people. The country has 67 million inhabitants. Next week, its health authorities will receive a first delivery of 800,000 doses, enough to vaccinate 400,000 people. The vaccination consists of two injections, separated by 21 days.

But why would the British vaccinate a month earlier than the Americans and Europeans? Mainly For two reasons: your regulator’s rush to approve the vaccine and the fact that it was Boris Johnson’s government the first to sign with the pharmacist.

The United Kingdom always in practice in the European Union (until next December 31) and would have to wait for the European Medicines Agency to approve the vaccines, but member states they can continue in case of “urgent need”.

The European Medicines Agency, who, on Brexit, moved from London to Amsterdam earlier this year to flee Brexit, will not give vaccine approval until the end of this month and European governments will not start vaccinating their risk groups until early January. Belgium, for example, announced on Wednesday that its vaccination campaign would begin January 5, as if the sting was brought by the magi.

European governments has not signed national agreements with pharmaceutical companies. They centralized these contracts within the European Commission. Therefore will pay less per dose than if they had negotiated alone. Brussels has signed several agreements and will have hundreds of millions of doses, enough to vaccinate the 440 million citizens of the 27 Member States. Some countries, like Spain, have bought twice as much insurance as needed and promise that the excess will be donated free of charge to your poorest neighbors from the south, such as Morocco, Mauritania or Senegal.

The European Commission will distribute the vaccines among the health systems of European countries as they are received from pharmaceutical companies. The number that the capitals will receive will be according to the weight of its population in the block. If, for example, the first week of January Brussels receives 10% of the vaccines needed by the entire European population, it will start to vaccinate 10% of Germans, 10% of French people, 10% of Spaniards, etc.

National governments are responsible for deciding which groups They are the first to receive the vaccine, although they all bet first the elderly who live in the residences and the people who care for them and then the rest of the elderly and health workers in general.

Brussels has no doubts that its European Medicines Agency perform the necessary steps to make sure that your analyzes are efficient and complete, but do not question the mechanisms of the British regulator, which ensures its rigor in compliance with international standards.

What the British regulator was able to do any national regulator European claiming this “urgent need”, as the Hungarian also did to buy the Russian vaccine without the European Agency even seeing it. But while a controversy may arise in the coming days over why Britons are vaccinated in the first place than other Europeans, it doesn’t seem likely that a country will get ahead. Among other reasons because they will not have the vaccine virus before the last days of December or early January.

Brussels, special