Cathleen O’GradyThe United Kingdom’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) announced today that it has granted emergency authorization for the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, marking the first such approval outside of Russia and China.“It is only 12 months since the first recorded case of COVID-19,” Arne Akbar, president of the British Society for Immunology, said in a public statement this morning. “To achieve this within this timescale is remarkable and the researchers should be applauded.”The European Medicines Agency (EMA), which regulates drugs and vaccines in the European Union, said yesterday that its Scientific Committee for Human Medicines will meet on 29 December at the latest to discuss the.