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LONDON (AFP, BLOOMBERG) – Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II will receive the coronavirus vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech in a few weeks, after UK regulators granted emergency approval and the world’s first deployment begins next. week, according to reports on Saturday (December 5).
The 94-year-old monarch and her husband, Prince Philip, 99, are in line to receive the early jab due to their age and will not receive preferential treatment, the Mail on Sunday reported.
The newspaper said Britain’s top royals would reveal that they have been given the vaccine “to encourage more people to take the vital jab” amid fears that so-called anti-vaccines could take a toll on your enthusiasm.
Britain is preparing to roll out its first Covid-19 vaccine with plans to administer the injection in more than 1,000 centers across the country over the next several weeks with the first vaccine expected to be delivered on Tuesday (December 8).
The vaccine, created by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, reached safe places in the UK from Belgium, the Department of Health and Welfare said on Sunday. After quality checks to ensure that the injections have been kept at the correct temperature, the injections will be available at 50 hospitals across the country, before being distributed to the physician-run vaccination centers who will administer the injections.
Britain will become the first Western country to implement a Covid-19 vaccine after regulators approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Wednesday. The government has bought 40 million doses from companies, enough to inoculate 20 million people with the two-dose regimen. The injections will be given in order of priority, and the first vaccines will go to people in nursing homes, including workers and people over 80.
Vaccines are slated to arrive in hospitals on Monday with the first vaccinations starting Tuesday, according to a separate statement from England’s NHS, and patients aged 80 and over already in hospital or attending appointments there are the first to receive the vaccine, the NHS said. . Any citations not used for the first priority groups will be given to healthcare workers at high risk for serious illness from Covid-19.
“Next week will be a historic moment when we start vaccination against Covid-19,” Matt Hancock, UK health secretary, said in a statement. “We are doing everything we can to make sure we can overcome the significant challenges in vaccinating nursing home residents.”
One of the main challenges in the coming weeks will be ensuring that the vaccine is kept at the proper temperature. The injection should be stored at about minus 70 degrees C and can only be moved four times within that cold chain before use, according to NHS England. Once thawed, the injection has a shelf life of days. Each box of vaccines, containing five 975-dose packs, must be manually unpacked and the temperature unloaded to verify that it has not changed during transport.
When more vaccine becomes available, smaller sites such as local pharmacies will also be involved in administering the injections, the government said.
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