AMSTERDAM– The European Union drug regulator said Friday that documents about the coronavirus vaccine stolen from its servers during a cyber attack were not only leaked online but were also “manipulated” by hackers.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) noted that an ongoing investigation into the theft found that hackers had received emails and documents from November regarding the evaluation of experimental vaccines against the virus. The agency, which regulates drugs and drugs on the block, had extensive confidential information about Covid-19 as part of the approval process.
“Some of the correspondence was manipulated by the perpetrators prior to publication in a way that could undermine confidence in vaccines,” the agency said.
He said that, given the devastating effects of the pandemic, there is “an urgent public health need to make vaccines available to EU citizens as soon as possible”. The agency insisted that, despite this urgency, its decisions to recommend vaccination approval were based “on the strength of the scientific evidence about the safety, efficacy and quality of a vaccine, and nothing else.”
Germany and other EU member states sharply criticized the Amsterdam agency in December for not approving vaccines against the virus any faster. The EMA issued its first recommendation for the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine weeks after it had already been given the green light in Britain, the United States, Canada and other countries.
The European agency has recommended a second vaccine produced by Moderna in the first days of this month. And it is currently evaluating a third, that of AstraZeneca and Oxford.
The EMA indicated that law enforcement agencies are taking “necessary action” in response to the cyber attack.