The work of distributing coronavirus vaccines to the 50 hospitals in Britain, which have been designated as vaccination hubs, begins today, after the arrival in the country of the first doses by truck from the Pfizer facility in Belgium.
In the coming days, the British health authorities will have received 800.000 doses of the preparation. NHS Providers chief Chris Hopson, who represents most service providers in the UK national health system, told the BBC this morning that the vaccines would be ready in hospitals on Tuesday.
By the end of the month, the government was expecting 10 million installments, a quantity that has now been called into question. Business Minister Alok Sarma declined to say whether the country would receive all 10 million installments this year, citing "some millions" in installments.
On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Hopson said via Twitter that hospital administrations would act on a case-by-case basis that predicts that no more than 800.000 doses of the first immediate distribution phase will be received this year.
In this context, he announced, the plan is changing again as to which citizens will receive the vaccine first. In particular, an effort will be made to be the first to vaccinate as many guests and nursing home staff as possible, people who are in any case the first in the order of priority recommended by the Joint Vaccination and Immunization Committee (JCVI).
To do this, nursing homes will be asked to arrange for the transfer of guests and staff to one of the 50 hospitals.
However, the Drugs and Health Products Authority (MHRA), which on Wednesday approved the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, reportedly gave the green light to split the 975 doses of the drug in smaller packages into smaller quantities.
This will allow vaccines to be delivered to nursing homes. Due to the special composition and the need to store the preparation at -70 degrees Celsius, the vaccine should be transported away from the cold freezers of hospitals within six hours of thawing and the preparation should be refrigerated at a temperature of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius so that it can be administered within five days.
The next category of citizens to be vaccinated is the elderly over 80 years old. In the coming days, the citizens of this category will be vaccinated who either have already arranged an appointment in one of the 50 hospitals-nodes or are already hospitalized there for any reason.
Despite estimates so far that first-line medical and nursing staff will be vaccinated first due to the difficulty in moving the vaccine out of hospitals, this will eventually be done after each hospital has ensured that there are excess doses that currently cannot be given to nursing homes and to citizens over 80 years of age.
Moreover, according to the Daily Telegraph, even those who have been vaccinated will not be exempted from the 14-day quarantine requirement if their tracking system detects them as close contact with a confirmed carrier of the virus.
This is because while the vaccine has been shown to be extremely effective in developing immunity to SARS-Cov-2, it has not been established whether it prevents any vaccinated citizen from becoming a carrier and potential transmitter of the virus.
Source: RES - EIA