UK Business Secretary Alok Sharma has announced a global licensing deal clinched between Oxford University and the pharma giant AstraZeneca, which is part of the government’s £130 million ($157 million) plan to provide at least half of the British population with the COVID-19 vaccine.
“Our scientists are at the forefront of vaccine development. This deal with [the British-Swedish drugs firm] AstraZeneca means that if the Oxford University vaccine works, people in the UK will get the first access to it, helping to protect thousands of lives”, Sharma told reporters on Sunday.
He said that the agreement stipulates delivering 100 million doses of the vaccine in total, and “ensuring that in addition to supporting our own people, we are able to make the vaccines available to developing countries at the lowest possible cost”.
"The UK continues to lead the global response to find a vaccine, and the government is backing our scientists to do this as quickly as possible”, Sharma underscored.
At the same time, the Business Secretary warned that there's no guarantee that the vaccine would work, adding that the UK would "need to look at other drug treatments and therapeutics for those who get the virus”.
Sharma was echoed by British Health Secretary Matt Hancock who tweeted last week that the government’s “injection of a further £84 million ($101 million) for a coronavirus vaccine is a great step forward in our national effort”.
As far as the term is concerned, The Sun quoted Professor Sarah Gilbert, whose team is working on a vaccine at Oxford University as saying that it could be ready in the coming months. According to the newspaper, AstraZeneca will make about 30 million doses of the Oxford coronavirus vaccine by September if it works.
Johnson Warns UK ‘May Never Find’ Coronavirus Vaccine
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, however, was not so sure, suggesting last week that “a mass vaccine or treatment may be more than a year away”.
"Indeed, in a worst-case scenario, we may never find a vaccine. So our plan must countenance a situation where we are in this, together, for the long haul, even while doing all we can to avoid that outcome”, Johnson pointed out in his foreword to the government's new 50-page guidance on a gradual easing of the national lockdown measures.
Earlier, the UK government kept mum on whether they could guarantee that Britons would be the first to benefit from a domestically-made vaccine.
“What we are doing is working on both the development of vaccines and ensuring that we can produce them very quickly in the UK so that everybody in the UK who needed a vaccine could get it as soon as possible”, a government spokesperson told reporters in late April.
This followed the government’s move to set up a special task force “to accelerate” the development of the vaccine, which came amid London’s decision to provide £14 million (about $17.2 million) in investments for 21 new research projects to fight the coronavirus spread.
