Has the Covid-19 vaccine been tested properly?

At a press conference following the announcement, Dr June Raine, head of the MHRA said the approval was made after “an extremely thorough and scientifically rigorous review of all the evidence of safety, of effectiveness and of quality of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine”.

England’s chief medical officer, professor Chris Whitty, has tweeted today saying: “This is a very encouraging step forward. I would like to say a huge thank you to those who volunteered and the researchers around the country. The regulators will now do their independent analysis for safety and efficacy but this is another important advance.”

How did they find a Covid-19 vaccine so quickly?

England’s deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam recently said the normal timeframe for finding a vaccine is 5-10 years. Speaking in a Department of Health and Social Care video, he explained how a Covid-19 vaccine could be found so quickly, saying: “The shackles have come off in terms of investing. Governments […] have put hundreds of millions of pounds into this, deliberately, on purpose, to try to speed it up.

“But is true that the threshold for safety and or effectiveness are different for Covid-19 vaccines? Absolutely not.”

Covid-19 vaccine approval: can we finally accept the good news?