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BRUSSELS (NYTIMES, BLOOMBERG) – Doses of the vaccine manufactured by US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and a small German company BioNTech, the first rigorously green-light-tested coronavirus vaccine for use, are being packaged in Belgium for shipment to Great Britain this week.
Pfizer plans to ship 800,000 doses to Britain in the next few days from its Puurs production facility in Belgium.
Britain on Wednesday (December 2) granted emergency use authorization to the Covid-19 vaccine, becoming the first Western country to pave the way for mass inoculations against a disease that has killed more than 1.4 million people. people all over the world.
The British government said it had accepted the recommendation of the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency to approve Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine for use and that it will be launched from next week.
As of Tuesday night, those doses were being prepared for shipment, BioNTech said.
Boxes of several thousand doses each are packed with dry ice to keep them at the South Pole-like temperatures they require, before being put on trucks or planes and taken to Britain.
They will hit government distribution warehouses over the weekend, Pfizer said Wednesday.
British hospitals have already started emailing staff members to schedule vaccinations, and a London hospital system indicates that their first doses will be given at 7am next Monday.
Britain pre-ordered 40 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, but most of those are expected to be administered next year. Each patient needs two, one month apart.
An advisory body to the British government released its list of vaccine priority groups on Wednesday. At the top of the list are nursing home residents and workers, followed by people over 80 and health and social care workers.
However, in practice, government officials said Wednesday that due to difficulties in storing and moving the Pfizer vaccine, they would initially restrict the vaccines to a network of 50 hospitals.
As a result, nurses, doctors, nursing home staff, and people 80 and older who had scheduled appointments would be first in line to get the vaccine, ahead of nursing home residents.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine should be stored at extremely cold temperatures for up to a few days before use.
Moderna vaccines are stable at refrigerator temperature for 30 days. The AstraZeneca-University of Oxford jab can be kept at refrigerator temperature.
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