UK: Vaccine roll-out to be slower than hoped but increases in May

British health officials warned on Wednesday that the world's fastest big economy roll-out of the vaccine would face a significant reduction in supplies from March 29, though they did not say where the problems were.

Pfizer Inc and AstraZeneca Plc said their delivery schedules had not been impacted, and Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick refused to be drawn on whether the issue was due to a problem with supply from India.

"We have less supply than we might have hoped for the coming weeks but we expect it to increase again later," Jenrick told the BBC.

"The vaccine roll-out will be slightly slower than we might have hoped but not slower than the target," he said. "We have every reason to believe that supply will increase in the months of May, June and July."

Britain is on track to have given a first shot to half of all adults in the next few days, making it one of the fastest countries to roll out a vaccine.

So far 25.27 million people in the United Kingdom have had a vaccine, around 48% of adults, and Jenrick said Britain remained on track to have vaccinated priority groups by April 15 and all adults by the end of July.

Asked if the issue was supply from India, he declined to discuss specific contracts.

Britain is rolling out vaccines made by Pfizer and AstraZeneca, with 10 million doses of the 100 million ordered from AstraZeneca coming from the Serum Institute in India.

An AstraZeneca spokesman said: "Our UK domestic supply chain is not experiencing any disruption and there is no impact on our delivery schedule."