Positive News in Britain - Upside for BVS

From AFR “Britain is poised to become the first Western country to approve a COVID-19 vaccine, with the independent regulator set to grant approval within days.

Deliveries of the vaccine developed by BioNTech and Pfizer would begin within hours of the authorisation, according to government officials. The first injections could take place from December 7.

Britain has ordered 40 million doses of the two-shot product, which preliminary data found to be more than 95 per cent effective in preventing disease.

Vaccines would normally be authorised by the European Medicines Agency until the end of the Brexit transition on December 31.

However, the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency has the power to temporarily authorise products, in cases of urgent public need.

The same process could be applied to the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University. On Friday, the government wrote to the regulator, asking it to review the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine.

Russia approved a coronavirus vaccine in August, but this was not based on large-scale trial data.

Downing Street announced on Saturday that Nadhim Zahawi, a junior minister at the Department for Business, would be seconded to the Department for Health as a minister to oversee the roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines.

BioNTech and Pfizer earlier this month submitted data from the large-scale phase 3 trial, which involved more than 43,000 people, to the US Food and Drug Administration.”