‘The day UK led humanity’s charge against Covid’: Tory MP Sharma mocked for over-the-top cheer as London approves foreign vaccine

UK business secretary Alok Sharma attracted backlash after tweeting that the UK had “led humanity’s charge” against the Covid-19 pandemic by merely approving a new US-German vaccine earlier than other countries.

“The UK was the first country to sign a deal with Pfizer/BioNTech - now we will be the first to deploy their vaccine,” Sharma wrote on Wednesday, celebrating the development, which he called a “breakthrough.”

The grandiosity with which Sharma described a somewhat routine decision made by the UK's drug regulating agency was largely ridiculed online. Many of Sharma’s mockers focused on the fact that the upcoming vaccine was developed neither by a British company nor by British scientists.

“A vaccine developed in Germany by Turkish migrants and manufactured in Belgium, at the point we're actively making it more difficult to import,” one person tweeted, jokingly adding, “Yep, got “UK” written all over it.”

Others took Sharma’s words in a more alarmist way, saying that his apparent attempt to let the UK take credit for a foreign invention was “rampant nationalism.”

Some, however, saw the situation just as Sharma presented it, saying it was “good news” for the UK.

Notably the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was approved ahead of the British one being produced by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. The Pfizer cure, said to be 95 percent effective, already made headlines when Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he will receive the jab live on TV to prove it’s safe.

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