Vaccination in the United Kingdom started earlier than in the European Union and the United States.
It was the first country to administer the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine to its population and it is also the first to immunize with the doses of the University of Oxford and Astrazeneca pharmaceuticals.
An 82-year-old man, Brian Pinker, was this Monday the first person in the United Kingdom to be vaccinated with this vaccine against covid-19, after the MHRA [Medicines and Health Products Regulatory Agency, in its acronym in English] approved it on December 30th.
Pinker has been vaccinated at Oxford University Hospital.
“I am so happy to receive the covid vaccine today and really proud that it is one of the ones created in Oxford.
The nurses, doctors and medical staff have all been fantastic today and I am looking forward to celebrating my 48th wedding anniversary with my wife Shirley at the end of the year, ”Pinker said in a statement.
The UK becomes the first country in the world to authorize the Oxford and AstraZeneca vaccine
The United Kingdom already has committed 100 million doses of the preparation of Oxford and AstraZeneca, which will allow to vaccinate 50 million people, since two doses are needed.
This vaccine has shown an efficacy of 62% in its largest trial, with 11,636 volunteers.
However, in a subsequent test with a subgroup of 2,741 volunteers in the UK, who were given a first half dose and a full dose four weeks later, the efficacy reached 90%.
On the other hand, this immunization does not require such complicated logistics for its conservation and distribution as that of Pfizer, approved for use on December 2 by the MHRA and which has already been supplied to hundreds of thousands of patients.
The latter must be kept at a temperature of 70 degrees below zero, and only maintains its effectiveness for little more than three days with conventional refrigeration.
The AstraZeneca can be stored between two and eight degrees.
The United Kingdom is one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic at the moment, especially aggressive due to the new strain of the virus that has spread from the British islands to at least 14 other European States, including Spain.
On January 3, the country chaired by Boris Johnson registered a new record for diagnoses, with more than 57,000 new cases.
It also registered 445 deaths, improving the figures with which the year ended, with about a thousand deaths a day.
In total, since the pandemic began, the UK has reported 74,570 deaths and 2,599,793 cases of coronavirus.
Information about the coronavirus
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- Guide to action against the disease
