Dr. Anthony Fauci criticized the United Kingdom for rushing through the authorization process for a coronavirus vaccine, telling CBS News that British regulators failed to adequately scrutinize data from drug manufacturers before approving a vaccine.

“They kind of ran around the corner of the marathon and joined it in the last mile,” Fauci told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett in an interview for this week’s episode of “The Takeout” podcast. “They really rushed through that approval.”

The U.K. became the first country in the West to approve a COVID-19 vaccine for public use, granting emergency authorization for a vaccine jointly developed by American drugmaker Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech.

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was the “gold standard of regulation.”

“They’re doing it in a very careful way, appropriately,” Fauci said about the FDA process for approving a vaccine. “Because if we did anything that was cutting corners and rushing — we have enough problems with people being skeptical about taking a vaccine anyway — if we had jumped over the hurdle here quickly and inappropriately to gain an extra week or a week and a half I think that the credibility of our regulatory process would have been damaged.”

Fauci questioned why British scientists took data on the efficacy of the vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech at face value instead of taking the time to independently scrutinize its effectiveness, and noted that the U.K. had also been criticized by officials in the European Union.

“I love the Brits, they’re great, they’re good scientists, but they just took the data from the Pfizer company and instead of scrutinizing it really, really carefully, they said: ‘OK, let’s approve it, that’s it.’ And they went with it,” Fauci said. “In fact, they were even rather severely criticized by their European Union counterparts who were saying, you know, ‘That was kind of a hot dog play.’ I didn’t say that, they did.”

Fauci’s comments come after FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn told CBS News’ Dr. Jon LaPook on Wednesday that the FDA is one of the only agencies globally to look at the underlying data from a vaccine trial.

“What I can tell you is we’re one of the few regulatory agencies in the world, if not the only one, that actually looks at the raw data from clinical trial,” Hahn said. “So we’re not going to take a summary from a company and take their conclusions and base our decision upon that. What we’re going to do is actually crunch the numbers ourselves, look at safety, look at efficacy. And we’re going to do that line by line with different patient groups.”

Hahn also said that the FDA has between 100 and 150 people working on every emergency use authorization application for a vaccine.

The U.S. recorded over 3,100 COVID-19 deaths in a single day, obliterating the record set last spring, while the number of Americans hospitalized with the virus has eclipsed 100,000 for the first time and new cases have begun topping 200,000 a day, according to figures released Thursday.

The three benchmarks altogether showed a country slipping deeper into crisis, with perhaps the worst yet to come, in part because of the delayed effects from Thanksgiving, when millions of Americans disregarded warnings to stay home and celebrate only with members of their household.

Across the U.S., the surge has swamped hospitals and left nurses and other health care workers shorthanded and burned out.

“The reality is December and January and February are going to be rough times. I actually believe they are going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation,” Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Wednesday.

Health authorities had warned that the numbers could fluctuate strongly before and after Thanksgiving, as they often do around holidays and weekends, when because of reporting delays, figures often drop, then rise sharply a few days later as state and local agencies catch up with the backlog.

Still, deaths, hospitalizations and cases in the U.S. have been on a fairly steady rise for weeks, sometimes breaking records for days on end.

Nationwide the coronavirus is blamed for over 270,000 deaths and about 14 million confirmed infections.

The U.S. recorded 3,157 deaths on Wednesday, according to the tally kept by Johns Hopkins University. That’s more than the number of people killed on 9/11, and it shattered the old mark of 2,603, set on April 15, when the New York metropolitan area was the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak.

The number of people in the hospital likewise set an all-time high Wednesday, according to the COVID Tracking Project. It has more than doubled over the past month.

Also, the number of newly confirmed infections climbed just over 200,000 Wednesday for the second time in less than a week, by Johns Hopkins’ count.