On Saturday, I was very pleased to receive my first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine a the Llay British Legion. Excitingly, I was offered the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab - or in other words - 'Wrexham's jab'!
The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was developed at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute in collaboration with AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company. In the UK, two facilities in Oxford and Keele are producing the vaccine, which is then brought to Wockhardt in Wrexham for the ‘fill and finish’ element. This involves distributing the vaccine into vials for delivery to the vaccination sites. In total, Wockhardt will manufacture 300 million doses of the vaccine. Earlier this year, the UK Government extended the ‘fill and finish’ contact with Wockhardt by six months to August 2022.
Importantly, the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has repeatedly been shown to be highly effective at reducing symptomatic Covid-19, severe disease, and hospitalisation. Recent studies undertaken in the USA, which utilised 32,000 volunteers, found the vaccine to be 76% effective at reducing Covid-19 cases after the first dose and 100% effective at preventing severe cases of the disease.
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