It was recently announced by Pfizer that its COVID-19 vaccine candidate had returned 95% efficacy in the Phase 3 clinical trial results! Following this, the United Kingdom became the first Western country to approve a COVID-19 vaccine, when it authorised Pfizer's vaccine candidate! Almost immediately, Pfizer applied for emergency use authorisation in the United Kingdom and it was granted with the vaccines expected to be ready for distribution, very soon! Now, we have some great news for Britons! The Pfizer-BioNTech developed COVID-19 vaccine, will begin rolling out in Britain, from this week!

A statement released by the Britain government has revealed that the vaccine shot will first be made available in hospitals, following which it would be distributed to doctors' clinics. The first doses of the vaccine will be administered on Tuesday and the National Health Service (NHS) has announced that the first priority for the vaccine shots would be given to people over 80 years of age, frontline healthcare workers and care home staff and residents! When the vaccination starts, it would become the most crucial inoculation program in history!

We hear that Britain has ordered 40 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine, which would be enough to inoculate 20 million people, of the 67 million population. Reports state that a stock of 800,000 doses are expected to be made available, for the first week itself and that initial doses have already arrived from Belgium and are being stored in secure locations all over the country. These vaccines will then be quality checked before being used for the immunisation, the Health Ministry has said. This vaccine has some critical storage requirements and needs to be kept at -70 degrees Centigrade and has a shelf-life of less than a week, if kept in a normal fridge. Also, the vaccine would require a few hours to defrost, before it can be prepared for use.