Top government infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, criticized the United Kingdom for approving the COVID-19 vaccine as quickly as it did.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said the British government “really rushed through that approval.”
“You know, I love the Brits. They’re great. They’re good scientists,” Fauci said in an interview with CBS News on Thursday. “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.”
The U.K. relies much more heavily on reports submitted by pharmaceutical companies than does the Food and Drug Administration, which runs its own analysis of trial results.
Fauci called the FDA “the gold standard of regulation.” With so many people skeptical of a COVID-19 vaccine, he suggested, it would have been unwise for the FDA to have moved at the speed of the U.K.
“I think that the credibility of our regulatory process would have been damaged,” he said.
