OREANDA-NEWS. Vaccination of the population with the medication developed by the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford has started in the United Kingdom.

82-year-old Brian Pinker was the first to receive the vaccine, the National Health Service reported on its Twitter page.

Great Britain approved the vaccine of AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford on December 30. Interim trials held in the UK and Brazil have confirmed an average vaccine efficacy of 70 %. According to the newspaper Times, from mid-January the UK every week will receive about 2 million doses of the medicine. In early December, the country began vaccination with vaccine jointly developed by Pfizer (USA) and BioNTech (Germany).

Since the beginning of the pandemic, 2.6 million infected have been identified in Great Britain. 75 thousand people died.