The company manufacturing the Oxford Covid jab is ‘imminently’ scaling up to release two million doses a week in the UK.

Tom Keith-Roach, president of AstraZeneca UK, said 1.1 million doses of the Covid-19 jab developed with Oxford University had been released to the UK to date, but the aim was to reach two million a week 'on or before' mid February.

Speaking to the Commons Science and Technology Committee today, he said: “We are scaling up very rapidly – and this will happen imminently – to releasing two million doses a week.

"We’re absolutely on track to do that and therefore deliver tens of millions of doses in the first quarter of the year."

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“If we average two million a week through the course of the year, that gets us to the 100 million doses that we’re committed to the UK through the course of 2021.”

Later, he added: “We are scaling up to two million doses a week imminently and we’d certainly hope to be there on or before the middle of February.”

He said the middle of February was a “conservative position” and said the firm had been asked by the UK Vaccines Taskforce “not to share in public forum in detail daily delivery schedules and locations for security reasons.

“As you can imagine it’s very sensitive, but I can reassure you that we will scale to two million doses per week very quickly.”

Later, he said the firm could not commit to doses above two million per week but it may be they could “increase that somewhat as we move into quarter two”.

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