Anti-vaxxer movement in UK is not growing, health minister claims, as Britain approves Covid vaccine

UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock claimed on Wednesday that the anti-vaxxer movement in the UK is not growing, while also announcing that the government will have millions of vaccine doses by the end of year.

Britain is preparing to start rolling out the Pfizer-BioNTech jab next week, after it became the first country to grant it approval for widespread use.

Hancock does not see the anti-vaxxer movement as an obstacle to his government’s efforts to vaccinate the population. “The good news is that it’s not growing,” he told LBC radio. “We monitor this very carefully and actually the number of people who want to have the vaccine is increasing.” It’s important because “obviously that’s the right thing to do,” he noted.

The secretary spoke soon after Britain’s medicines regulator MHRA had approved the Pfizer vaccine. “The regulators are fiercely independent, they would not approve this if it wasn’t safe,” he said.

Britain has already ordered 40 million doses of the free jab, which will be enough to vaccinate 20 million people. The first 800,000 doses will be available from next week, according to Hancock.

In an interview on BBC Radio 4, Hancock also announced that Britain may have “a matter of millions of doses for the whole of the UK by the end of the year.”

Hospitals are ready to receive the shots, and authorities will be setting up vaccination centers across the country, the health secretary said. However, Hancock admitted there may be hiccups during the distribution of the jabs because they must be shipped and stored at -70C (-94F) temperature.

To prove that the new vaccine is safe, Hancock told ITV’s Good Morning Britain on Wednesday that he would receive the Covid vaccine live on TV.

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