The report comes after the United Kingdom approved the COVID-19 Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine
About two million doses of COVID-19 vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca will be delivered each week until mid-January in the United Kingdom, The Times reported.
AstraZeneca expects to deliver a total of two million doses of vaccine by next week, the newspaper reported, citing an unnamed member of the Oxford-AstraZeneca team. “The plan is then to build it fairly quickly – by the third week of January we should reach two million a week,” the report added.
The company was not immediately available to respond to a request for Reuters comments.
The report comes after Britain approved the COVID-19 Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine on Wednesday, hoping that swift action will help it stop a record wave of infections caused by a highly contagious form of the virus.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has ordered 100 million doses for the country as part of an agreement with the company. The company said it plans to deliver millions of doses in the first quarter, adding that the first vaccinations should begin this year.
The UK, which has seen more than 50,000 new daily cases of COVID-19 in the last four days, is facing a rapid spread of a much more infectious variant of coronavirus. As of Friday, the United Kingdom had 53,285 new COVID-19 cases and 613 deaths.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and is published in a syndicated stream.)