UK to begin using Oxford Covid vaccine as PM strikes hopeful tone
This is a thrilling development. My sources tell me we are likely to be less thrilled about how the challenges of rolling the vaccine out will be addressed. I have some modest recent personal experiences of the challenges on this score. Lets hope everything clicks into place!!!
People in the UK will begin receiving the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine on Monday, after the prime minister expressed hope that the pace could be ramped up to protect tens of millions of people from Covid-19 within the next few months.
In England the first doses would be administered in a small number of hospitals for surveillance purposes, said the NHS: in Oxford, where the vaccine was invented, London, Sussex, Lancashire and Warwickshire.
Once it is certain there are no hitches, the jab will be shipped within days to GP-led centres in the community. There are 730 vaccination centres at the moment, with a further 180 and 100 more hospital sites scheduled to open this week.
The first priority is to immunise care home residents. Although the UK government’s advisory Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) recognised this group as the most vulnerable to Covid, the need to store the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine at -70C in the long term has meant supplies have not been taken into most care homes. GPs are now being offered £10 for every care home resident they vaccinate by the end of January.
Boris Johnson said he could not yet say how fast the vaccination programme would be scaled up to the 2 million jabs a week he hoped for.
“I wish I could give you here and now any sort of elaboration on the figures you have already heard about how we hope to get up to 2 million a week and so on,” he told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday. “I can’t give you that yet. What I can tell you is that … we do hope that we will be able to do tens of millions in the course of the next three months.”