Dr. Anthony Fauci apologized late Thursday night for his comments suggesting that the United Kingdom was hasty in its approval of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine, saying that he has “great faith” in U.K. legislators.
“I do have great faith in both the scientific community and the regulatory community at the U.K., and anyone who knows me and my relationship with that over literally decades know that’s the case,” Fauci said during an interview with the BBC. “I do have confidence. It came out wrong, and that was not the way I meant it to be.”
Dr Fauci says he didn’t mean to “imply any sloppiness” & walked back comments about speed of UK vaccine approval
The top US infectious disease expert says he has “great faith” in UK scientific community & regulators & apologised for any “misunderstanding”https://t.co/byLY0aRNct pic.twitter.com/oji6jQIvJ8
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) December 3, 2020
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said Thursday afternoon that the U.K. had “really rushed through that approval” process, referring to its recent approval of Pfizer and BioNTech’s promising coronavirus vaccine candidate.
“You know, I love the Brits. They’re great. They’re good scientists,” Fauci said during an interview with CBS News. “But they just took the data from the Pfizer company. And instead of scrutinizing it really, really carefully, they said, ‘OK, let’s approve it. That’s it.’ And they went with it.”
President Trump has frequently complained about the pace that the Food and Drug Administration has taken during its review of Pfizer’s request for an emergency use authorization. Pfizer sent the request on Nov. 20, and a hearing is scheduled for next week. The process would likely see an approval for the vaccine next Friday, with an announcement the following week.
Fauci stressed during his interview with the BBC that he meant his remarks to be a comment on the current climate of skepticism in the United States regarding advice from scientific professionals — especially when it comes to vaccines.
“The point I was really trying to make, and I did not make it appropriately well … in the United States, there is such a considerable amount of tension of pushing back on the credibility of the safety and of the efficacy,” Fauci said. “If we in the United States had done it as quickly as the U.K. did it, and that’s no judgment on the way the U.K. did it … if we had, for example, approved it yesterday or tomorrow, there likely would have been pushback on an already scrutinizing society that has, really I think in some respects in the United States, too much skepticism about the process.”
“This is not a race where there’s one winner and one good one and one bad one,” Fauci said. “It’s a bunch of companies and a bunch of countries trying as best as possible to get vaccine to their citizens as quickly as they can possibly.”
