The head of the European Union drug regulator has said the agency's work on assessing Covid-19 vaccines had not been affected by a cyberattack over the past two weeks.
“We have been subject to a cyberattack over the last couple of weeks," Emer Cooke told EU lawmakers in a hearing. The agency revealed the cyberattack on Wednesday but did not clarify when it took place.
“I can assure you that this will not affect the timeline for delivery of vaccines and that we are fully functional," she told lawmakers. The agency has said it will decide on a possible conditional approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine by December 19th.
German company BioNTech and US pharmaceutical company Pfizer say data on their coronavirus vaccine were “unlawfully accessed” during the cyberattack on the servers of the European Medicines Agency.
The Amsterdam-based agency, which is considering requests for conditional marketing authorisation for several coronavirus vaccines to be used in the 27-nation European Union, said earlier on Wednesday that it had been the target of a cyberattack.
