England, United Kingdom — The United Kingdom has begun the mass vaccination program with Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine which has proven to be 70 percent effective in its trials.
The first person to receive this vaccine is an 82-year-old dialysis patient named Brian Pinker who received the vaccine at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s Churchill Hospital.
I am so pleased to be getting the Covid vaccine today and really proud that it is one that was invented in Oxford.
Mr Pinker said.
Along with Mr. Pinker, an 88-year-old music teacher and a paediatrician working at the Oxford University Hospitals, Professor Andrew Pollard also were among the first to get vaccinated by the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
Oxford informed that currently they have 700 vaccination sites in operation and are expecting to open hundreds more this week to administer the first 500,000 doses of the new vaccine.
The government of Maldives earlier informed that they will be procuring the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University and that the inoculation programs are expected to begin within the first quarter of the coming 2021.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was authorized by the British Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency for use in the United Kingdom on Wednesday, and is in high demand globally, especially in developing countries.
The vaccine of Oxford-AstraZeneca is cheaper and easier to store and distribute than Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine which was authorized for use in the UK four weeks back, as they can be stored in standard refrigerators rather than at the ultra-cold or freezer temperatures some other vaccines require.
