The World Health Organization on Thursday gave “emergency validation” to pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech’s va...
The World Health Organization on Thursday gave “emergency validation” to pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech’s vaccine against the coronavirus. The emergency listing paves the way for countries to expedite their regulatory approval process to “import and administer the vaccine”.
“The World Health Organization (WHO) today listed the Comirnaty COVID-19 mRNA vaccine for emergency use, making the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine the first to receive emergency validation from WHO since the outbreak began a year ago,” the world body’s statement read.
WHO Assistant-Director General for Access to Medicines and Health Products called this a “positive step” towards global access to the vaccines against Covid-19. “But I want to emphasize the need for an even greater global effort to achieve enough vaccine supply to meet the needs of priority populations everywhere,” he added.
The world health body had convened regulatory experts from across the world along with its own teams, which reviewed the information on the Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine safety, efficacy and quality as part of a “risk-versus-benefit analysis”. “The review found that the vaccine met the must-have criteria for safety and efficacy set out by WHO, and that the benefits of using the vaccine to address COVID-19 offset potential risks,” the statement read.
The Pfizer/BioNTech #COVID19 vaccine today...
