LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s medicines regulator will be ready and able to give approval to new versions of COVID-19 vaccines designed to counter new variants of the coronavirus that may appear, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Wednesday.
Asked if the government would develop a new rapid pathway to allow approvals of new versions of vaccines to protect against such variants, Johnson said: “Yes indeed… we’ve been talking about that with the scientists over the last days and weeks intensively, just in the last few hours.”
“We’re confident that the (medicine regulator) MHRA will be in a position to turn around new applications for new variants of vaccines, as may be required to deal with new variants of the virus,” he told lawmakers.
(Reporting by Alistair Smout, editing by Estelle Shirbon)
