The European Medicines Agency (EMA) must meet this Monday, December 21, 2020 in order to give or not, its marketing authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in Europe. It will thus give more visibility on the days to come and on the possibility of a European vaccination campaign which would start before the end of the year.
EMA facing pressure from European countries
This Monday, December 21, 2020, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is meeting to decide whether or not to authorize the European distribution of the candidate vaccine developed by the American laboratory Pfizer and the German biotechnology company BioNtech. Originally scheduled for December 29, the meeting was moved forward a week. A decision following numerous calls for rapid action from certain European countries such as Germany, Poland and Hungary.
If these member countries of the European Union are putting pressure on the EMA, it is because an emergency authorization has already been granted for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in certain countries of the world such as the United Kingdom, the Canada, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Singapore, Israel and even Switzerland. However, the European regulator had already indicated that it would take a decision only when the data on the quality, safety and efficacy of the vaccine were ” sufficiently robust and complete to determine whether the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks “.
For information and just like the Pfizer vaccine, the EMA has also brought forward its meeting on the competitor Moderna vaccine by one week, initially scheduled for January 12, 2021.
A decision that the European Commission will then have to approve
If the European Medicines Agency committee cannot make a decision today, the EMA has announced that another meeting could take place on Tuesday, December 29, 2020. In the event that the EMA gives its green light for the Pfizer vaccine, we will still have to wait for the approval of the European Commission before launching the vaccination campaign throughout the European Union. The latter has three days to give its marketing authorization for the vaccine in Europe. Then it will be the turn of the French Medicines Agency to analyze the composition of the candidate vaccine in order to study its compliance before allowing its delivery to priority people.
For now, the European Commission says on Twitter that “ Europe stands ready. If the European Medicines Agency approves the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine, the vaccination campaign can start on December 27 “.
