EU’s New Drug Agency Head Warns of Vaccine Safety Challenges
- Cooke takes helm at European Medicines Agency at crucial time
- Regulator to assess mRNA technology used by Pfizer, Moderna
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Monitoring the safety of Covid-19 vaccines, especially those relying on novel technologies such as messenger RNA, will be one of the biggest challenges once shots are rolled out widely, according to Europe’s new drug agency chief.
Positive results won’t “remove the need to monitor very carefully these new vaccines, particularly the first couple that seem to be coming through,” Emer Cooke, who becomes executive director of the European Medicines Agency Monday, said in an interview. “We haven’t had mRNA vaccines before, and when it goes into a large population you need to be sure” safety remains under review.