Tens of millions of Novavax vaccine doses will be produced and packaged in the UK, Boris Johnson has announced.
It comes after a ‘fill and finish’ deal was made with pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline, to bottle 60 million doses at its facility in Barnard Castle in the North East.
Fill and finish is the process where vaccines are packaged up in vials, ready to be sent out to vaccination clinics.
Production was initially meant to take place in Europe once the vaccine was manufactured by plants in the north east.
But a contract has been struck with the drug firm for the jab, which is 86 per cent effective against the Kent variant and 96 per cent effective in preventing cases caused by the original strain, to be produced here.
Announcing the new deal between GSK, The Vaccine task force and Novavax, Mr Johnson said it would “further boost our vaccine rollout.”
He added: “The Vaccines Taskforce has worked hand in glove with business to successfully deliver vaccines to the whole of the UK, and this agreement will continue to support our approach.”
The major development comes just weeks after the EU threatened to halt the export of the AstraZeneca vaccine to the UK after Ursula Von Der Leyen claimed the firm had underproduced and undelivered to the bloc.
She said the EU would consider halting exports to countries with higher coverage rates than its own, as it struggled to achieve the pace of rollout managed in the UK.
A government source told the Guardian that the UK had always intended to build a domestic manufacturing scheme but suggested that the plans had been underlined by the row with the EU.
