The UK issued the first shots of a Covid-19 vaccine AstraZeneca Plc and the University of Oxford, in a race against a faster-spreading variant of the coronavirus that has led to new movement restrictions in much of the country.
The first injection was administered Monday morning to an 82-year-old kidney dialysis patient at Oxford University Hospital.
Britain ramps up its vaccination campaign as coronavirus infections increase across the country, putting the country on the brink of a new state national lockdown. It is faster in approvals and rollouts than in the US or European Union, releasing the AstraZeneca-Oxford product despite clinical trials involving a smaller number of participants complicated by a dosing error. A regulatory decision to extend the interval between doses of the two injection vaccines to as much as 12 weeks has raised further questions.
Brian Pinker will receive the AstraZeneca Plc and the Covid-19 vaccine from the University of Oxford in Oxford on January 4.
Photographer: Steve Parsons / PA Wire / Bloomberg
A new kind estimated to be as much as 70% more transferable is fueling the pandemic resurgence in the UK. Schools have closed in much of the country, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned that stricter restrictions may be coming.
UK regulators took the recording of AstraZeneca-Oxford last week, achieving the first global approval. It is the second injection authorized for emergency use in the UK, following an injection of Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE received the green light in early December.
According to the Department of Health and Social Care, more than a million people in Britain have received injections of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
How the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine Works
The viral vector vaccine uses a harmless virus to transport genetic material that elicits an immune response to the coronavirus
Sources: University of Oxford, AstraZeneca, Bloomberg research
The UK drove ahead of France, where only about 500 people had taken the first photos this weekend. President Emmanuel Macron has come under fire for the slow pace of that country’s rollout, which has been hampered by caution amid high levels of vaccine skepticism. France is not only lagging behind European neighbors such as Great Britain and Germany, but also Israel, where more than 12% of the population has already received injections.
Read Bloomberg’s Covid-19 Vaccine Tracker
In the UK, more than 500,000 AstraZeneca-Oxford doses will be available as of Monday and will be delivered to hospitals in the first few days. The UK aims to expand the number of vaccination sites to more than 1,000, with as many as 100 additional hospitals and 180 GP-run services coming online this week.
While the recently approved vaccine has shown lower effectiveness in clinical trials than the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, it has some important advantages: It’s cheaper and easier to transport and store, and only requires refrigerator temperatures instead of deep-freezing. That makes it crucial to the wider global vaccination pressure.
David Nabarro, the World Health Organization’s special envoy for Covid-19, called for caution amid the global push to vaccinate the population.
“I would really urge any leader to slow down the rush a bit to get the vaccine into as many arms as possible and spend more time systematically planning what should be a truly effective global operation,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
The NHS administers the first injections under a two-shot regimen approved by the Medicines and healthcare Regulatory body for products. The second can be given as much as 12 weeks later as the UK aims to maximize the number of vulnerable people receiving the first serving, providing some protection against infection.
The UK has also taken a more flexible approach to the two-dose regimen and says so In certain circumstances – such as when it is not known which vaccine a patient received the first time – the second injection may be given with a product from another company.
The UK regulator has not yet released full data to support its decision to allow a longer time interval between shots, which has drawn opposition from the British Medical Association.
“It is downright and blatantly unfair to tens of thousands of our most at risk patients to try to reschedule their appointments now,” said Richard Vautrey, chairman of the association’s general practitioner committee.
– With help from Janice Kew
(Updates to WHO advisor’s comments from the 10th paragraph)