Counting Days Until The UK Injects The First COVID-19 Vaccine

Illustration (Source: United Nations)

JAKARTA - The UK is ready to launch the Pfizer / BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine this week. Britain will be the first country, the most advanced progress from the use of the vaccine in collaboration with the United States (US) and Germany.

This was confirmed after last week the UK approved the emergency use of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccines. The UK will first provide vaccine injections in hospitals before distributing the stock to doctors' clinics.

The first dose is set to be given Tuesday, December 8. The National Health Service (NHS) gives priority to people over 80, healthcare workers, and staff and residents of nursing homes.

In total, the UK has ordered 40 million doses. That's enough to vaccinate 20 million people in a country of 67 million people.

About 800 thousand doses are expected to be available in the first week. The initial doses that have arrived from Belgium are stored in safe locations across the country, where their quality will be checked, the health ministry said.

The Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine has severe storage requirements. The vaccine needs to be stored at -70C (-94F) and lasts only five days in a regular refrigerator.

For this reason, the Ministry of Health stated that the vaccine will be given first in 50 hospitals. The Health Ministry also said it would take several hours to thaw each vaccine and prepare it for use.

The UK's NHS has written to general practitioners telling them to prepare to administer vaccinations through the services of a local doctor starting December 14. Rather than running clinics in individual operations, local doctor groups will operate more than a thousand vaccination centers across the country, the government said.

The vaccine box contains five packs of 975 doses, but special regulatory approval is required to separate them. A senior medical official said that although he hopes to divide the parcels and send them directly to a nursing home, it is not guaranteed.

The UK was one of the first countries to launch vaccinations outside the context of clinical trials, raising hopes that the wave of vaccinations could soon turn against a virus that has killed nearly 1.5 million people worldwide and devastated the world economy. Russia began distributing the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine through 70 clinics in Moscow on Saturday, although the injection has not completed its final trials.