MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 20th January, 2021) The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the UK's medical regulator, should have the infrastructure in place to approve vaccines for future COVID-19 variants if required, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Wednesday.
"We're confident that the 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," Johnson said in parliament.
The discovery of new highly infectious variants of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Brazil has triggered a new wave of travel bans as countries across the globe look to slow the spread of strains of the disease that are believed to be up to 70 percent more transmissible.
The UK has broken its national single-day record for new COVID-19 cases and coronavirus-related deaths multiple times since the emergence of a new variant of the disease in southeast England in December.
The Department of Health and Social Care added 1,610 deaths to the UK's COVID-19 death toll on Tuesday, the largest single-day increase since the start of the pandemic. In total, 91,470 UK residents have died within 28 days of a positive test for the coronavirus disease.
