London to pilot 24/7 vaccination sites
Before the end of the month, London will begin piloting COVID-19 vaccination sites that will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, according to Nadhim Zahawi, the United Kingdom's minister for COVID-19 vaccine deployment.
England's National Health Service (NHS) will trial the round-the-clock vaccination sites at hospitals in the British capital.
"And we'll look at how we expand that," Zahawi told Sky News in an interview Monday.
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Zahawi said the key with 24-hour vaccination sites is to ensure vulnerable populations, such as people over 80 and others deemed high-risk, are still being targeted.
"At the moment, the challenge is obviously supply -- limited supply vaccine that needs to get into the arms of the most vulnerable four cohorts. So the targeting has to be really, really precise so that we can protect them by mid-February," he added.
"So if you just want to chase volume, chase speed and not accuracy, 24 hours works really well," he continued. "If you want to chase both accuracy, protecting the most vulnerable and of course speed, then you want to do what we're doing which is primary care networks, hospitals, large vaccination centers and of course pharmacies."
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As of Saturday, 3,857,266 people in the U.K. have received the first of two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the latest data published on the U.K. government's website.
The U.K. Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has approved three COVID-19 vaccines for use to date -- one developed by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, a second developed by England's University of Oxford and British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, and a third developed by American biotechnology firm Moderna.
The U.K. -- an island nation of 66 million people made up of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland -- has confirmed more than 3.3 million cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, including over 89,000 deaths. There were 38,598 new cases and 671 additional deaths confirmed over the past 24 hours, according to the latest data.