TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – The UK begins to vaccinate its population with the Covid-19 vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca on Monday.
Britain, which is in a hurry to vaccinate its population faster than the United States and other European countries, was the first country to launch the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine.
The UK launched the Pfizer vaccine and Germany’s BioNTech last year.
The dialysis patient Brian Pinker, 82, was the first to receive the Oxford / AstraZeneca injection at 07.30 GMT at Oxford University Hospital, just a few hundred meters from where the vaccine was developed.
“I am very happy to have the COVID vaccine today and very proud that it was found in Oxford,” said Pinker, a retired maintenance manager on dialysis for kidney disease.
He is looking forward to celebrating his 48th wedding anniversary with his wife Shirley in February.
“The nurses, doctors and staff today were all brilliant,” he said.
Britain has injected more than a million the Covid-19 vaccine to its citizens, more than any other European country, said Health Minister Matt Hancock.
“It was a victory for British science that we managed to achieve where we are today,” Hancock told Sky News. “Right at the start, we saw that a vaccine was the only long-term solution.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has secured 100 million doses of the AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine that can be stored at a refrigerator temperature of between two and eight degrees, making it easier to distribute than a Pfizer injection, which requires temperatures of minus 70 degrees Celsius.
Six hospitals in the UK are administering the first batch of about 530,000 doses that the UK has prepared. This program will be extended to hundreds of sites English more in the coming days, and the government hopes to deliver tens of millions of doses of the coronavirus vaccine within months.
Source:
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain/pivotal-moment-as-britain-set-to-roll-out-astrazeneca-vaccine-idUKKBN299001
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