U.K. Gives World's First Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine

The U.K. gave the first shots of a Covid-19 vaccine from AstraZeneca Plc and the University of Oxford, in a race against a faster-spreading coronavirus variant that’s prompted new lockdowns across much of the country.

The first injection was administered to an 82-year-old kidney dialysis patient at Oxford University Hospital on Monday morning.

U.K. regulators cleared the AstraZeneca-Oxford shot last week, marking its first approval worldwide. It’s the second coronavirus injection to be authorized for emergency use in Britain, after one from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE received the go-ahead in early December.

The U.K. has moved more rapidly on vaccine approvals and rollouts than the U.S. or the European Union, clearing the AstraZeneca-Oxford product despite clinical trials that involved a smaller number of participants and that were complicated by a dosing error. A regulatory decision to lengthen the interval between doses of the two-shot vaccines to as many as 12 weeks has prompted further questions.

Britain is stepping up its vaccine campaign as coronavirus infections surge across the country, with more than 50,000 new cases reported daily. A new strain that’s estimated to be as much as 70% more transmissible is fueling the pandemic’s resurgence. Schools have been closed across much of the country and Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned that tougher restrictions may be on the way, with the National Health Service facing a growing strain on hospitals.

More than a million people in Britain have received injections of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a statement from the Department of Health and Social Care.

The U.K. has raced ahead of France, where fewer than 400 people had gotten their initial shots as of this weekend. President Emmanuel Macron has come under fire for the slow pace of that country’s rollout, which has been hampered by caution amid high levels of vaccine skepticism. France is behind not just European neighbors such as Britain and Germany, but also Israel, where more than 12% of the population has already gotten shots.

In the U.K., more than 500,000 AstraZeneca-Oxford doses will be available as of Monday, and they will be delivered at hospitals for the first few days. The U.K. aims to expand the number of vaccination sites to more than 1,000, with as many as 100 more hospitals and 180 general practitioner-led services coming online this week.

“Everybody’s working flat out to do this,” Johnson told the BBC on Sunday. “We do hope that we will be able to do tens of millions in the course of the next three months.”

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