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LONDON: People in Britain will be able to decide whether they want to get the COVID-19 vaccine or not, Health Minister Matt Hancock said on Tuesday (November 10), adding that children do not need to be vaccinated.
“We are not proposing that this be mandatory, mostly because I think the vast majority of people will want to have it,” Hancock told BBC TV on Tuesday.
“This is not for children and children have very low susceptibility to coronavirus,” he added.
THE HEALTH SERVICE WILL BE READY FOR THE VACCINE IN DECEMBER
The British government has asked the National Health Service to be ready to roll out any COVID-19 vaccine from the beginning of December. Then the vaccine will be released, starting with the most vulnerable, Hancock said Tuesday.
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The health minister told Sky News that there were still many obstacles to overcome and that the government would not roll out the vaccine until it had confidence in its clinical safety.
Monday’s news that a Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine was more than 90 percent effective sparked a surge in financial markets around the world – rare good news in the fight against a disease that has killed more than a million of people.
Britain hopes to have 10 million doses of the vaccine available by the end of the year.
“I asked (the NHS) to be ready from the beginning of December,” he said.
“Of course there are many hurdles that need to be overcome and we have not seen all the safety data and obviously that is critical and we will not implement a vaccine unless we can be confident in its clinical safety.”
He added that he did not know when there would be an update on the trial results for a vaccine produced by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca.
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