UK Is Likely To Have The Oxford/Astrazeneca Covid-19 Vaccine As The Most Widely Used One


11/24/2020



According to experts, it is most likely that people in the United Kingdom will get shots of the Oxford vaccine as the first Covid-19 vaccine despite regulators of the country also analysing the vaccine of Pfizer.
 
The reason that the Oxford vaccine will most likely be the first vaccine to be used widely prior to that from Pfizer is because the former can be stored and transported in normal fridges compared to the Cvoid-19 vaccine from the later which has to be stored at -75C.
 
 “It’s a bit like the tortoise and the hare”, said Richard Wilding, a professor of supply chain strategy at Cranfield University. “You could argue that the tortoise was the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, but it could be the overall winner in terms of the volumes that are going to go out, because it doesn’t face the logistical obstacles and challenges that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine does”, he added.
 
“The key thing is that the ‘time to market’ for Pfizer may be the quickest but the thing you need to consider is ‘time to volume’ – that is, getting and enabling mass vaccination. It may be the AstraZeneca vaccine being easier to manage within conventional supply chains may win out.”
 
It is also expected that the drug used by family doctors will be the Oxford vaccine and such doctors will be the lead players in the vaccination drive in the UK, the Royal College of GPs also said.
 
“We’re hearing really positive news about the Oxford vaccine. It appears to be effective and to pose fewer logistical challenges than other vaccines, for example, around storage and distribution, which would have been particularly challenging in general practice. It is likely that different vaccines will be more appropriate for different settings, for example, the Oxford vaccine sounds like it is more suitable than others for delivery at a primary care level,” Dr Steve Mowle, the college’s honorary treasurer, said:
 
The two groups the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation have said that the care home residents and staff and anyone over 80 should be the top priority for vaccination against Covid-19 and the GPs are set to be the healthcare professionals who will immunise individuals from these target groups.
 
The Oxford vaccine will be produced in the UK while Pfizer’s vaccine is being manufactured in Belgium. A contract worth £50m for making of an unknown number of millions of doses over the next 18 months has been struck by the UK government and CP Pharmaceuticals in Wrexham, north Wales, for the Ozxford vaccine.
 
it was “on standby” to produce the Oxford vaccine and it has already started to undertake trial runs expecting that the vaccine will get approval from the regulators in the UK pretty soon, said a spokesman for CP Pharma, which trades as Wockhardt. We don’t have a date yet but production is due to start soon,” said the spokesman.
 
(Source:www.theguardian.com)