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In an interview with Radio 5 Live Dr June Raine, chief executive of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), played down the suggestion from Boris Johnson (see 11.44am) that the need for batch testing was holding up the supply of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. Asked about Johnson’s comment, she said:
It’s part of our end-to-end process where everything is thoroughly checked, the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control batch release biological medicines as their job and so that process begins very early, before approval is granted, to look at what is needed to do all the right checks and therefore at the time of approval everything is there and in hand.
Yes, and we have scaled up, in the fullness of time, if there are more vaccines, to be able to batch release all of them. I was really proud last Wednesday when we approved the AZ vaccine, the Oxford/AZ vaccine, that we had approved the first batch the night before. We are that nimble and that quick.
The MHRA is fully scaled up to do the batch testing that’s so important for confidence as the new products come through.
It is aspirational, but depending on the size of the batch, most certainly we have the capacity.
Rates of coronavirus have fallen in Wales but remain very high and the new variant is spreading quickly, the country’s health minister, Vaughan Gething, has said.
Gething told a press conference that cases of coronavirus in Wales “remain very high”, though rates have fallen back from “incredibly high levels” seen before Christmas. He said:
The overall incidence rate for Wales has fallen from a high of 636 cases per 100,000 people on December 17 to 446 cases today.
This is still far too high. There have been falls in most parts of Wales, except in north Wales, where we are seeing cases rise quickly. We believe this is because of the new fast-moving strain.
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