UK will diverge from EU and US on approving tweaked Covid vaccines

MHRA says it will not insist that vaccines altered for new variants are non-inferior' to original

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The UK will adopt a different standard from Europe and the US when it considers approval for coronavirus vaccines that have been tweaked to deal with variants, the regulator has said.

There would be no compromise on safety or effectiveness, said Dr June Raine, the head of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). But the UK will not insist, as the European and US regulators do, that the tweaked vaccine must be non-inferior" to the original.