Britain will start vaccinating people against COVID-19 with the Pfizer vaccine next week after the country’s regulator approved the jab on Wednesday, health minister Matt Hancock said on Wednesday.
“From early next week we will start a programme of vaccinating people against COVID-19 here in this country,” he told Sky News, calling it “fantastic news”.
Britain on Wednesday became the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for use and said that it will be rolled out from early next week.
A vaccine is seen as the best chance for the world to get back to some semblance of normality amid a global pandemic which has killed nearly 1.5 million people and upended the global economy.
“The government has today accepted the recommendation from the independent Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to approve Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for use,” the government said.
“The vaccine will be made available across the UK from next week.”
Britain’s vaccine committee will decide which priority groups will get the jab first such as care home residents, health and care staff, the elderly and people who are clinically extremely vulnerable.
Both Pfizer-BioNTech and U.S. biotech firm Moderna have reported preliminary findings of more than 90% effectiveness – an unexpectedly high rate – in trials of their vaccines, which are both based on new messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.
Pfizer said Britain’s emergency use authorization marks a historic moment in the fight against COVID-19.
Health Secretary Hancock shortly after the jab was approved by the UK medicines regulator said the United Kingdom expects to have millions of doses of the Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19 available by the end of the year.
“We’re expecting a matter of millions of doses for the whole of the UK by the end of the year, and I’m purposefully not putting a figure on it, because we don’t know,” he said on BBC Radio 4.
Main Photo: (FILE) – An undated handout made available by the German pharmaceutical company Biontech shows a hand holding an ampoule with BNT162b2, the mRNA-based vaccine candidate against COVID-19, in Mainz, Germany EPA-EFE/BIONTECH SE
