Millions to receive Oxford coronavirus vaccine from Jan 4

The Oxford vaccine will be rolled out from January 4 across the country under plans being drawn up by ministers, The Telegraph can reveal.

The Government is aiming for two million people to receive their first dose of either the Oxford vaccine or the Pfizer jab within a fortnight as part of a major ramping up of the inoculation programme.

The Telegraph can also disclose that mass vaccination centres at sports stadiums and conference venues are primed to launch in the second week of January, provided the regulator approves the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine within days.

The rollout of the Oxford vaccine, which is easier to store and handle than the Pfizer jab and costs less, is likely to make it easier to reach people living in the most secluded areas of England.

The Government has ordered 100 million jabs, with 40 million due to be rolled out by March next year. Senior Government sources said that approval could come as soon as Sunday after the company submitted its final tranche of data to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) on Monday evening.

On Saturday night, the chief executive of AstraZeneca said that its vaccine is as effective as the ones developed by Pfizer and Moderna.

“We think we have figured out the winning formula and how to get efficacy that, after two doses, is up there with everybody else,” he told The Sunday Times. “I can’t tell you more because we will publish at some point.”

Meanwhile, after the first Pfizer vaccine doses were delivered to care homes this week, “roving” health teams have now been tasked with visiting hundreds of additional homes by New Year’s Eve.

It comes after the Department for Health and Social Care admitted on Friday that just seven care homes had been visited by Christmas Eve, while figures suggest residents account for only 0.3 per cent of the 613,000 people inoculated so far.

By the end of the first week of January, the Government is privately aiming to have delivered the first dose of both vaccines to two million people in England, with the numbers due to accelerate as supply increases.

However, Downing Street on Saturday night stressed that these were internal ambitions, rather than official targets.

It comes amid growing pressure on ministers to accelerate the rollout of the vaccine in response to surging infection rates across the country, fuelled by the new strain of Covid-19 which is believed to have originated in Kent.

After cases more than doubled this week across England, with hospital admissions eclipsing the peak in April, fears are mounting that a tougher nationwide lockdown will be required unless jabs can be distributed more quickly to the elderly and extremely vulnerable.

“We are deploying as fast as we get the stuff in,” a Whitehall insider said on Saturday night. “The constraint is supply, not deployment.

“The protocol around Pfizer is really difficult, but with AstraZeneca it’s much easier, it’s like the flu vaccine.”

Easier to store, handle and more readily available than the Pfizer vaccine, the Government also intends to distribute the Oxford jab to mass vaccination centres, including sports hall, stadiums and conference centres from the second week of January.

The Nightingale hospital at the London ExCel centre, Epsom racecourse in Surrey, Bristol's Ashton Gate football stadium and the Robertson House conference facility in Stevenage will serve the capital and south of England, while Manchester Tennis and Football Centre, the Centre for Life Science Park in Newcastle and Leicester Racecourse are the mass vaccine sites for the North and the Midlands.

The Oxford vaccine is also due to be administered alongside the Pfizer jab at 83 hospital hubs and 400 GPs which are already operational, with a further 200 GPs due to be online by this weekend.

As supplies of the vaccine increase, the Government is also preparing to expand rollout to primary care networks and community pharmacies.