The European Medicines Agency (EMA) could approve the first vaccines against the new coronavirus as early as this year or early next year, the EMA said on Monday.
European Commission (EC) President Urzula von der Leiena said last week that the EMA could give the “green light” to vaccines developed by US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German company BioNTech, as well as US pharmaceutical company Moderna, before the end of December. “.
The EMA noted that it is still difficult to predict when vaccines will be approved as data continue to arrive and evaluation is ongoing.
“Depending on the progress of the evaluation, EMA could indeed be in a position to complete the evaluation of the best candidates at the end of this year or early next year,” the agency said.
EMA is accelerating the evaluation of three potential Covid-19 vaccines being developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna and the University of Oxford in collaboration with AstraZeneca.
Pfizer and BioNTech have stated that their vaccine is 90% effective and have already sent data to the EMA.
Moderna has reported that its Covid-19 vaccine was 94.5% effective in clinical trials.
The vaccine, developed jointly by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, was on average 70.4% effective in clinical trials. This vaccine has been tested at different doses and has been shown to be 90% effective in a single dose regimen.
Several European countries have already announced plans to vaccinate a large proportion of the population once the vaccines have been approved by the EMA.
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