Photographer: Anthony Devlin / Bloomberg
Photographer: Anthony Devlin / Bloomberg
The UK will confirm that residents of every eligible care home in England have been given a Covid-19 vaccine, even as a dispute over exports from Europe raises supply concerns.
Where possible, shots have been offered to eligible residents of more than 10,000 homes, official figures to be shown later Monday. The announcement comes after yesterday’s assurance by International Trade Secretary Liz Truss that the national supply of vaccines is safe and that the country will adhere to the rollout schedule.
The UK aims to offer vaccines to about 15 million people in the four main priority groups by February 15. That includes nursing home residents, over-70s, primary care health workers and the clinically extremely vulnerable. So far, a total of 8,977.32 people have received their first dose, with a record number of nearly 600,000 people being poked on Saturday alone, government data shows.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the nursing home numbers as “a critical milestone in our ongoing race to vaccinate the most vulnerable.” Still, he warned that the number of cases and people in the hospital remains dangerously high. More than 100,000 people have died in the UK after a positive test for the virus.
Among those hospitalized with Covid is Captain Tom Moore, the 100-year veteran who raised nearly 40 million pounds ($ 55 million) for the National Health Service.
The UK expanded its vaccine pipeline on Monday by exercising an option to order a new one 40 million doses of Valneva SE, bringing the total to 100 million doses. According to Valneva, the UK has an option for an additional 90 million doses from 2023-2025 valued the total of 190 million doses at a staggering 1.4 billion euros ($ 1.7 billion).
| Developer | Number of doses insured by the UK |
|---|---|
| Oxford / AstraZeneca | 100 million |
| Valneva | 100 million |
| GlaxoSmithKline / Sanofi Pasteur | 60 million |
| Novavax | 60 million |
| BioNTech / Pfizer | 40 million |
| Janssen | 30 million |
| Modern | 17 million |
The government has “absolute confidence” that it can continue to implement its vaccine plan, Truss told Sky News on Sunday. Her comments came after the European Union’s executive arm announced that manufacturers would have to seek permission before sending bloc-manufactured shots to other countries. This raised concerns about the delivery of the Belgium-manufactured shot from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE to the UK.
Vaccine row
The origin of the dispute is AstraZeneca Plc’s decision to give preference to Great Britain over the EU following a Belgian production outage, which Brussels claims was a breach of contract. After a flurry of activity, AstraZeneca agreed to deliver 9 million additional doses of vaccine to the EU in the first quarter of this year, bringing the total for the period to 40 million, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Twitter on Sunday.
Read more: Faced with a vaccination crisis, the EU turned everyone’s enemy
The feud caused a stir following a threat from the EU to trigger unilateral emergency clauses in the post-Brexit deal with the UK, which officials have since come back to. Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin told the BBC the people were “blinded” by the move, while former Prime Minister Tony Blair described it as “very silly” and said it threatened to jeopardize the 1998 peace deal with Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement. .
Von der Leyen held a Sunday video call with chief executives of pharmaceutical companies to discuss how vaccines can be deployed, manufactured and approved more quickly in the future.
“The pandemic has made it clear that production capacity is a limiting factor. It is essential to address these challenges, ”the committee said in a statement following the call. It added that “the emergence of worrying variants increases the imminent threat of diminished efficacy of recently approved vaccines.”
– With help from Alex Morales and Marthe Fourcade
(Updates with Valneva order in sixth paragraph)