The UK has begun vaccinating citizens with the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus jab amid a surge in cases.
Brian Pinker, an 82-year-old dialysis patient, was the first person to receive the vaccine at the Churchill Hospital, a few hundred metres away from where it was developed.
“I am so pleased to be getting the vaccine today and I’m really proud that it is one that was invented in Oxford,” he said. “The nurses, doctors and staff today have all been brilliant and I can now really look forward to celebrating my 48th wedding anniversary with my wife Shirley later this year.”
The second person to receive the jab was Trevor Cowlett, an 88-year-old music teacher, while the third was Professor Andrew Pollard, a paediatrician working at the Oxford University Hospitals.
Around 53,000 doses of the Oxford University jab are initially being rolled out at six hospital trusts in Oxford, Sussex, Lancashire, Warwickshire, and two in London.
The bulk of the supplies will then be sent to more than 700 GP-led services and care homes.
The UK government hopes it will deliver tens of millions of doses within months, with the reported goal of administering two million per week.
It is the second vaccine to be rolled out in the UK, after the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was first given to grandmother-of-four, Margaret Keenan on 8 December.
The UK’s Health Secretary, Matt Hancock told reporters it was a “big British success story, starting today”.
But he said that fighting the virus was “a massive national effort”.
“It isn’t about blame, it’s about how we collectively, as a society, keep this under control for the next couple of months… until the vaccines can make us safe,” he said.
“We obviously have the very positive news this morning of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine started to be rolled out – it’s a triumph of British science that we’ve managed to get to where we are, but this new variant does make it so much harder to control the virus in the meantime.”
He added that from today, there were “700 vaccination sites open across the UK, and by the end of the week it’s due to be over 1,000.
“This is a pivotal moment in our fight against this awful virus and I hope it provides renewed hope to everybody that the end of this pandemic is in sight.”
So far, around one million people in the UK have received the other approved vaccine, which is produced by Pfizer and BioNTech.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which was approved on 30 December, is cheaper and easier to store and transport.
The UK has secured 100 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as part of its contract – enough for most of the population.
The UK is currently battling an acute outbreak, recording more than 50,000 new COVID-19 infections each day over the past six days.
On Sunday 3rd January, it reported another 54,990 cases and 454 virus-related deaths – taking the official number of deaths from the virus to 75,024.
