How the UK government was able to build up a supply of vaccines and how it is planning to deploy them.
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Vaccines are a foundation of our way out of this pandemic and the best way to protect people from COVID-19, potentially saving thousands of lives. Since the emergence of COVID-19 there has been a global quest to find a vaccine. Thanks to historic funding and fast, ground-breaking research, to date, 3 vaccines have been approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), after meeting their strict standards of safety, quality, and effectiveness.
The UK has a very successful record delivering vaccination programmes, but this is the biggest vaccination programme in NHS history. We have an ambitious timetable. By 15 February we aim to have offered a first vaccine dose to everyone in the top four priority groups identified by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).
This plan describes how we were able to build up a supply of vaccines and how we are planning to deploy them.
Co-operation across and between the 4 nations of the UK has been a key part of our approach to tackling the virus. The 4 UK chief medical officers have taken a joint approach in their advice regarding the vaccine and securing supply of vaccines is a UK-wide effort. Each of the UK nations has plans to scale up vaccine delivery and the ‘Places’ and ‘People’ sections of this plan set out the deployment plans of the NHS in England.