Report comes after Britain approved Oxford-AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine
Approximately two million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca will be delivered every week in mid-January in the UK, The Times reported.
AstraZeneca expects to supply two million doses of the vaccine in total by next week, the newspaper reported, citing an anonymous member of the Oxford-AstraZeneca team. “The plan is to develop it fairly quickly; by the third week of January we should reach 2 million a week,” the report adds.
The company was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
The report comes after Britain approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday, in hopes that swift action will help stem a record surge in infections driven by a highly contagious form of the virus.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered 100 million doses for the country as part of an agreement with the company. The company had said it aims to supply millions of doses in the first quarter, adding that the first vaccines are scheduled to begin this year.
Britain, which has recorded more than 50,000 new COVID-19 cases daily over the past four days, is grappling with the rapid spread of a much more infectious variant of the coronavirus. As of Friday, the UK has recorded 53,285 new COVID-19 cases and 613 deaths.
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