In an interview with the German media, a senior European Union official said that the European Union will accelerate the approval of an improved vaccine to deal with the variant novel coronavirus.
This interview was published in the German Augsburg Report on the 14th.
In an interview, Stella Kiriakidides, a member of the European Commission for Health and Food Safety, said: “We have reviewed the process with the European Drug Administration…
It has been decided that manufacturers based on previous (COVID-19) vaccines and modified vaccines against variant viruses do not need to go through the full approval process.
[We] will get the right vaccine sooner without affecting safety.”
In his speech to the European Parliament on the 10th, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen acknowledged that the EU has made mistakes in approving the market and purchasing vaccines, including the late approval of vaccines and underestimating the difficulties in mass production of vaccines.
In order to eliminate the bottlenecks faced by the mass production of vaccines and adapt to the production of the new generation of vaccines, the EU has established a working group.
This working group is led by Thierry Breton, a member of the European Commission for internal markets, of which Kiriakites is one of them.
Kiriakidides said that although vaccination progress in the EU region was slow in the first quarter of this year, the second quarter will catch up.
The EU expects that the vaccine received by the end of September can cover 70% of the population in the EU region.
The population of the EU region is about 440 million. EU member states started vaccination against the coronavirus at the end of December last year, but it lags behind the United Kingdom and the United States.
