The British government hopes to provide the first dose of COVID-19 vaccines to every adult by September, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab disclosed on Sunday.
Raab said the government will embark on a trial of round the clock injections at some locations as it looks for more vaccination sites to speed up the delivery of the shots.
“Our target is that by September to have offered all the adult population a first dose, if we can do it faster than that great but that’s the roadmap,” Raab told Sky News.
The secretary stopped short of promising that everyone will get their second vaccine dose within 12 weeks of the first one but added that the government “ought to be able to deliver on that.”
In December, the United Kingdom became the first Western country to approve a coronavirus vaccine for distribution. Russia was the first in the world after it approved Sputnik V in August.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered the U.K. into its third national lockdown earlier this month to slow the spread of the virus and protect the National Health Service, the country’s nationalized healthcare system, as it faces its toughest stress test in 72 years, battling the pandemic.
British officials are also monitoring the new coronavirus variant that first appeared in England late last year. Experts, however, say the new variant will still take to the vaccine.
Britain has more than 51 million adults in its population of 67.5 million people, according to the Associated Press. There have been over 3 million cases of coronavirus in the U.K., and over 88,000 deaths attributed to the virus. More than 3.8 million people in the U.K. have already received the first dose of a coronavirus vaccine.
