The UK gave the first shots of a vaccine against Covid-19 AstraZeneca Plc and the Oxford University, in a race against a more rapidly spreading coronavirus variant, has caused new restrictions on movement in much of the country.
The first injection was given to an 82-year-old kidney dialysis patient at Oxford University Hospital on Monday morning.
Britain intensifies its vaccine campaign as coronavirus infections grow nationwide, placing the country on the brink of another national blockade. It advanced faster in approvals and deployments than the United States or the European Union, eliminating the AstraZeneca-Oxford product despite clinical trials involving fewer participants and complicating a dosing error. A regulatory decision to extend the interval between doses of two-shot vaccines to 12 weeks has raised additional questions.
Brian Pinker receives the AstraZeneca Plc vaccine and Oxford University Covid-19 in Oxford on 4 January.
Photographer: Steve Parsons / PA Wire / Bloomberg
A new strain it is estimated that the most transmissible 70% fuels the resurgence of the pandemic in the UK. Schools have been closed in much of the country and Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned that there may be tougher restrictions.
UK regulators last week it approved the AstraZeneca-Oxford shooting, which marked its first worldwide approval. It is the second authorized injection for emergency use in Britain, after one of Pfizer Inc. i BioNTech SE received the approval in early December.
More than a million people in Britain have received injections of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to the Department of Health and Social Care.
How the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine works
The viral virus vaccine uses a harmless virus to transport genetic material that triggers an immune response to the coronavirus
Sources: Oxford University Research, AstraZeneca, Bloomberg
The UK has run ahead of France, where only about 500 people had received initial shots as of this weekend. President Emmanuel Macron has been attacked by the slow pace of deployment in this country, which has been hampered by precaution amid high levels of vaccine skepticism. France is behind not only its European neighbors such as 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 doses of AstraZeneca-Oxford will be available from Monday and will be delivered to hospitals in the early days. The UK plans to expand the number of vaccination sites to more than 1,000, with up to 100 more hospitals and 180 GP-led services to go online this week.
Although the recently approved vaccine has shown lower efficacy than Pfizer-BioNTech in clinical trials, it has some key advantages: it is cheaper and easier to transport and store, it only requires refrigerator temperatures instead of freezing. This makes it crucial for the wider push for global vaccination.
David Nabarro, special envoy of the World Health Organization for Covid-19, called for caution amid the global rush to vaccinate populations.
“I would like to call on all leaders just to slow down a bit the rush to get the vaccine in as many arms as possible and spend more time on systematic planning than should be a truly effective global operation,” he said. to say. he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
The NHS administers the first injections under a drug-approved two-shot regimen and Health care Product Regulatory Agency. The second can be administered up to twelve weeks later, as the UK seeks to maximize the number of vulnerable people receiving the first serving, which provides some protection against infection.
The UK has also taken a more flexible approach to the two-dose regimen, stating that in under certain circumstances, such as when it is not known which vaccine a patient received the first time, the second shot can be administered with a product from a different company.
The British regulator has not yet published full data supporting its decision to allow a longer time interval between dams, which has sparked opposition from the British Medical Association.
“It is unfairly obvious to tens of thousands of our most at-risk patients to try to reschedule their appointments,” said Richard Vautrey, chairman of the association’s general practitioners committee.
– With the assistance of Janice Kew
(Updates with WHO advisor comments from paragraph 10)