UK rolls out Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine
The United Kingdom began vaccinating its population with AstraZeneca and Oxford University’s COVID-19 vaccine. The move comes as the country faces a new surge of infections.
An 82-year-old dialysis patient on Monday became the first person to get the AstraZeneca shot outside of a trial.
Britain has recently seen a resurgence in daily infections, and two new variants of the coronavirus are complicating the COVID-19 response. The country was the first to roll out the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech just under a month ago.
Prime minister Boris Johnson warned of “tough weeks to come” and announced new restrictions: “If you look at the numbers, there’s no question that we’re going to have to take tougher measures and we’ll be announcing those in due course”, Johnson said.
Johnson’s government has secured 100 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. It hopes it will deliver tens of millions of doses within the next months.
