Belgian PM Calls Brits Covid-19 Vaccine ‘Guinea Pigs’

BELGIAN PM Calls Brits Covid-19 Vaccine ‘Guinea Pigs’ after the UK government approves the Pfizer vaccine early

Alexander De Croo, the Belgian Prime Minister, during a Q&A session on Belgian broadcasting channel VRT, has accused the UK government of treating British people as ‘guinea pigs’, sparking angry debate on social media, after he claimed the Pfizer vaccine was maybe rolled out too soon.

Show host Tony Thomas asked Mr De Croo, “Why are these vaccines so slow here, compared to other countries?”, to which De Croo replied, “The deliveries of vaccines happen in the same way for all European countries. So that things would go faster in the neighbouring countries. I don’t see why that would be the case. We will vaccinate at the speed of production. Hundreds of millions of vaccines have to be produced. We also looked at the needles and there will be no problem there”.

Then he added, “In the United Kingdom they started to vaccinate faster, that’s right. But there they took their population as guinea pigs and chose not to do those additional tests. The government will also take it on if things go wrong. We will not do that, we want to be sure in Europe that it is good and safe before we start vaccinating”.

Pieter Cleppe, from the Brussels-based research think-tank, Property Rights Alliance, shared De Croo’s remarks on Twitter, also pointing out comments made by the CEO of BioNTech, Ugur Sahin, who along with Pfizer, developed the vaccine, where Sahin had suggested that the delays in vaccine approval were not scientific, but more the fault of EU red tape.

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