UK Managing Director of Pfizer Ben Osborn Speaks to Jenny & Luke on Vaccine Supply and New Varients

Ben Osborn, the UK Managing Director of Pfizer, has told Times Radio the company is in "great shape" to meet the government's coronavirus vaccine ambitions.

Speaking to Jenny Kleeman and Luke Jones on Times Radio Breakfast, he said:

We're in great shape. We've been scaling up over the last few months. Globally our organisation is on track to supply 2 billion doses to the world and we're going to supply 40 million of those here in the UK. The scale-up continues and we're absolutely on track to meet the government's ambitions.

On on plans to trail the Pfizer vaccine on children:

We recognise we're going to need to protect the whole of our population against Covid-19. Right now we have an ongoing trial in children between the age of 12 to 15. We expect that data in the first half of this year and then we'll use the science, the data, the insight from that to consider how we then may set up trials for a younger population down to as young as 5.

On coping with covid mutations:

New mutations were expected. This was not a surprise to us. This is what parents do. It is part of the way that we've looked at the development of these vaccines. The data that we've got so far for our vaccine is incredibly reassuring. We've not seen a significant drop off in efficacy and so right now we don't anticipate that we're going to need to change the nature of our vaccine.