British drugmaker AstraZeneca says it will boost production of the coronavirus vaccine it developed with Oxford University to two million doses a week by the middle of January.
The U.K. government had given its approval to the vaccine earlier in the week, and had initially ordered 100 million doses.
According to the Times, an unnamed member of the Oxford/AstraZeneca team said production was expected to reach a total of 1 million doses by the end of next week.
“The plan is then to build it up fairly rapidly — by the third week of January we should get to two million a week,†they added.
This vaccine, like the Pfizer/BioNTech jab, requires two doses. Health authorities in the U.K. have decided to change their distribution strategy, prioritizing giving as many people a first shot as possible, delaying the second jab beyond the 28 days that was originally planned.
The second dose will instead be administered within 12 weeks.
Meanwhile, a senior scientist from Oxford University has complained that the country’s pharmaceutical manufacturing base is not prepared to handle the roll-out of the jab.
“The government has been completely disinterested in building onshore manufacturing capacity for any of the life-sciences products,” said John Bell, professor of medicine at Oxford.
