Covid 19 coronavirus: Pfizer starts manufacturing vaccine jabs - UK could get 40 million by New Year

Forty million coronavirus vaccines could be heading to the UK in the next two and a half months, it has emerged, after US multinational pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer revealed it had started the manufacturing process.

The pharmaceutical giant, which already has "hundreds of thousands" of doses ready at its Belgian production plant, is committed to delivering 100 million in 2020, 40 per cent
of which are earmarked for Britain.

However, rolling out such a vaccine to the public is subject to it being signed off as safe and effective by British regulators. The logistics of getting sufficient doses to the front line also pose a challenge.

On October 12, the New Zealand Government announced it had signed an agreement to purchase 1.5 million Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer and BioNTech, subject to the vaccine successfully completing all clinical trials and passing regulatory approvals in NZ.

People wearing face masks in central Auckland on September 9. Photo / Alex Burton

The two-dose Pfizer vaccine could potentially enable 20 million British patients to be inoculated before the New Year.

Ben Osborn, the UK head of Pfizer, said: "It's still to finish the clinical trials, it's still to go through the regulatory process, but we do have physical product there available should we be successful."

He told the Mail on Sunday: "We are already manufacturing the vaccine at risk and at scale."

Osborn's comments come amid increasing optimism that the vaccine candidate designed by Oxford University, seen as one of the front-runners in the international race, could become available in the UK before Christmas.

The Pfizer vaccine, which has not yet passed clinical trials or secured regulatory approvals, is delivered in two doses. Photo / File

Professor Jonathan Van Tam, deputy chief medical officer, reportedly told MPs last week that the drug, manufactured by AstraZeneca, could be ready for a mass roll-out as early as December.

According to the Sunday Times, he said: "We aren't light years away from it. It isn't a totally unrealistic suggestion that we could deploy a vaccine soon after Christmas."

Traditional vaccines work by injecting a deactivated or weakened form of the pathogen into the body in order to train it to recognise and defeat the active virus.

However, both the Oxford and Pfizer vaccines seek to introduce into the body a genetic sequence that prompts human cells to churn out parts of the Sars-Cov-2 virus, so the body can learn to deal with it that way.