On Monday, the UK began to roll out early AstraZeneca vaccine shots, for COVID-19, among the citizens. It’s touting to be the first one to do so.
According to Reuters, UK has begun rolling out the shots for COVID-19 to its population. AstraZeneca and Oxford University developed the vaccine. In doing so, the United Kingdom is touting itself to be the first one to test the vaccine on a wider level.
Before the current solution, Britain had also tried Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech vaccine shots last year.
Will the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine succeed?
Brian Pinker, a dialysis patient, aged 82, was the first to get a shot of the newly developed cure at the Oxford University Hospital.
“I am so pleased to be getting the COVID vaccine today and proud that it is one that was invented in Oxford,” the patient said.
Talking about the vaccine, Britain’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock said:
“That’s a triumph of British science that we’ve managed to get where we are.”
“Right at the start, we saw that the vaccine was the only way out long term.”
Currently, PM Boris Johnson’s government has around 100 million secured doses of AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine. And they can be stored between two to eight degrees of fridge temperatures.
As of now, six hospitals in the UK are ready to try out nearly 530,000 doses. It’s expected that in the next few months, more sites will be getting the doses.
In December itself, Britain was the first nation to try out Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine. With the rollout of the current solution, it has claimed to be the first to do so compared to the West and the rest of Europe.
Talking about other countries, then their approach is a bit cautious and gradually slow. However, Russia and China have already used various samples on their citizens. It could be dangerous since those samples are still undergoing last-stage trials.
On the other hand, India has also approved AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine recently, on January 3rd, for emergency use.
Pandemic is still strong across the globe
Meanwhile, Coronavirus is still growing stronger in many parts of the world with more new cases. In the last two weeks, newly discovered strains of the virus have been reported in the UK. And not only that, they have spread to other nations as well.
As per Reuters, in Europe itself, around 55,000 new cases have been reported (at the time of writing this article).
Currently, many people are hoping for AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine doses to succeed. However, it’s still an early phase of such trials and rollouts, so nothing much can be assumed.
Image courtesy of rawf8/Shutterstock