(Reuters) -Britain’s National Health Service late on Sunday denied a media report that claimed it has not committed to delivering two million COVID-19 jabs a week.
The Daily Telegraph newspaper had said the NHS declined to make the commitment due to the supply of vaccines and issues of logistics including creating an army of vaccinators to deliver the biggest vaccination programme in history. An NHS spokeswoman told Reuters the “story is not true”.
“As the CMO has said, the main barrier to vaccine delivery will be availability of the vaccine, and it is completely untrue that staffing constraints are currently standing in the way of vaccine rollout, with the NHS ready to deliver vaccine as supply becomes available,” the spokeswoman said in an email.
“The NHS is off to a strong start vaccinating one million people and now beginning the rapid rollout of the Oxford-AstraZeneca, which will enable us to vaccinate millions more people with the support of tens of thousands of vaccinators,” the spokeswoman added.
Britain has been at the forefront of approving new coronavirus vaccines, becoming the first country to give emergency authorisation to the Pfizer/BioNTech and the AstraZeneca/University of Oxford vaccines last month.
Manufacturers insist doses are being delivered to the timetable agreed with the government, the Telegraph reported.
(Reporting by Nandakumar D in Bengaluru; Editing by Chris Reese and Lincoln Feast.)
