Helping India With British Science: UK As It Buys 60 Million More Covid Vaccines

During a Downing Street briefing where he made that announcement, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock was questioned about sending vaccines to India as it battles a massive second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and faces vaccine shortages.

An extra 60 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine have been secured to help support a booster COVID-19 vaccination programme beginning from the autumn months later in the year, the UK government said on Wednesday. During a Downing Street briefing where he made that announcement, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock was questioned about sending vaccines to India as it battles a massive second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and faces vaccine shortages. "We currently have no excess doses, we are doing what we can... but we work very closely with India on vaccine production," the minister said, adding that the UK had ensured at-cost supply of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines to the Serum Institute of India, which is manufacturing some of the largest number of doses of the jabs in the world by "benefitting from British science". "That is the biggest contribution we can make," Hancock said.