The launch of the vaccine gives the United Kingdom a rare victory in combating the pandemic

Since the vaccine could only be refrigerated for three days after arriving at the clinic, health professionals knew they had to inject 400 doses a day by Saturday to run out of stock. There was already a line of people waiting for the “jabs”, so doctors quickly diluted the vaccine, placed the vials in trays and distributed them to a team of assistants.

This is the front line of what has become the most ambitious peacetime mass mobilization in modern British history. Britain has set up dozens of vaccination centers in sports stadiums, churches, mosques and even an open-air museum in the Midlands, known on television as the setting for the popular police series “Peaky Blinders”.

With almost 8 million people, or 11.7% of the population, having already received their first injection, Britain’s vaccination rate is faster than any major nation in the world. Only Israel and the United Arab Emirates are moving faster.

Rapid implementation is a rare success for a country whose response to the coronavirus was otherwise inadequate – plagued by delays, reversals and contradictory messages. All of this contributed to a death toll that recently exceeded 100,000 and consolidated Britain’s status as the hardest hit country in Europe.

Success brought its own headaches: doctors now worry about a shortage of supplies after a vaccine war broke out between Britain and the European Union. The EU imposed export restrictions on vaccines manufactured in the bloc on Friday, after accusing a British vaccine manufacturer, AstraZeneca, of favoring its domestic market.

And Britain’s aggressive approach is not without risks: in order to reach more people quickly, she chose to delay the application of the second doses for up to 12 weeks after the first, instead of the three or four weeks tested in clinical trials.

At the Bloomsbury clinic, however, there was a distinctly British atmosphere to continue with this. Most elderly patients waited patiently in line, rolled up their sleeves for the jabs and then retired to an outdoor gazebo for 15 minutes to be monitored for possible reactions.

“Many of my friends have already taken it,” said Emerenciana Mora, 72, a retired table operator, of the vaccine as she watched an assistant doctor, Nasra Yusuf, prepare the needle. “Even the queen did.”

The divergence between Britain and its European neighbors has led some to claim an unexpected advantage from Brexit. Britain’s divorce from the European Union helped give it the political leeway to authorize several vaccines before the bloc and to quickly block its own vaccine production from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.

France, on the other hand, vaccinated only 1.8% of its population and Germany 2.6%, according to figures collected by Our World in Data. This reflects the scarcity of supply that has hit the entire continent, as well as the slow pace of European Union regulators in vaccine approval.

But Britain’s success is also the result of basic decisions by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government.

Instead of hiring the campaign for private companies or building it from scratch, as it did with its expensive and ineffective contact tracking operation, the government placed vaccination in the hands of the National Health Service, which despite financial difficulties is still largely revered by the British public.

In addition to state hospitals, doctors are at the forefront of the program. This not only put trusted local doctors, who have experience with seasonal flu vaccines, in charge, but it also allowed these doctors to accurately target people in the government’s highest priority groups.

This is a stark contrast to the most fragmented approach in the United States. While Americans had to struggle for appointments on spoiled online portals and overloaded hotlines, British hospitals and doctors determined the schedule, allowing them to start with their older, vulnerable patients.

And while U.S. states use complicated rules to dictate who is eligible for vaccines – which has contributed to delaying implantation in some places – Britain has a clear system of prioritizing those who, due to their age, are most at risk dying from the virus, along with nursing assistants and health professionals who treat them.

“We work with these priority groups with absolutely no deviation,” said Dr. Daniel Beck, general practitioner and head of a federation of doctors, who was busy preparing bottles at the clinic. “It benefits everyone, regardless of whether they are someone who left home without studying or if you are a gentleman.”

Among the 6,000 people vaccinated at the Bloomsbury clinic since mid-December was Joan Collins, 87, the British actress famous for her role in “Dynasty”. But Beck said his top priority was to try to reduce the vaccine’s hesitation among racial and ethnic minorities, which polls show are more suspicious than whites of health officials’ support for the vaccine.

Abdul Mathlib, 85, a retired caterer who just received his injection, said he was concerned about the side effects of the vaccine, even years later. But Mathlib said it was worth taking the risk, adding, “You have to take it, right?”

While some observers point to Britain’s greater tolerance for risk than the European Union, they attribute more of the success of vaccination to the country’s strong scientific base, as well as to “good old-fashioned preparation,” said David Goodhart, a writer whose latest book, “The Road to Somewhere” explored Britain in the Brexit era.

In any case, it was not typical of Britain’s broader response.

Few foreign leaders have struggled with the pandemic like Johnson. He abandoned contact tracking on a large scale and resisted the imposition of a blockade, so he ended up in an intensive care unit himself after contracting the virus.

But during those first chaotic days, his ministers began to invest in vaccines and closed contracts with manufacturers. They also recruited Kate Bingham, a British venture capitalist, to lead a government vaccine task force.

In March, the government provided initial funding – £ 2.6 million, or $ 3.5 million – to the Oxford research team. In May, when the vaccine was still in clinical trials, Britain made a deal with AstraZeneca to buy tens of millions of doses, three months before the European Union negotiated its purchases.

With concerns about vaccine protectionism already on the rise, British authorities were determined to make any homemade vaccine quickly and easily accessible to the British. They spoke with the Oxford team while negotiating with Merck and other pharmaceutical companies looking for a partner to mass produce and distribute the vaccine.

Oxford ended up closing a deal with AstraZeneca, which is based in Cambridge.

“They made it very clear to me and others who wanted to know about the business and were anxious about the vaccine’s nationalism,” said John Bell, an Oxford professor and member of the government’s vaccine task force, referring to British officials of health.

Two factories in England are manufacturing the vaccine and a company in Wales is preparing it for distribution. The British government has said that most of its AstraZeneca vaccine shipments come from this supply chain.

AstraZeneca said its initial deal with Britain helped solve the inevitable manufacturing problems before it started to distribute the vaccine. Production problems at a Belgian factory led the company to announce that it would cut its deliveries to Europe by 60%, which triggered the dispute between channels.

“With the UK, we had an extra three months to fix all the flaws we experienced,” Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca, told an Italian newspaper, la Repubblica, this week.

On Friday, EU drug regulators authorized the AstraZeneca vaccine for all adults, following the precedent set last month by the British regulator.

In the meantime, Britain may soon receive another vaccine.

Novavax, a biotechnology company based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, reported on Friday that its vaccine proved 89.3% effective in a large-scale trial in Britain. The government has secured 60 million doses, to be made at a factory in northeastern England. If British regulators approve, the vaccine will be delivered in the second half of 2021.

In all, the British government has spent at least £ 11.7 billion, or $ 16 billion, on the development, manufacture, purchase and administration of vaccines.

“Vaccination is the only thing we get right,” said Christina Pagel, professor of operational research at University College London.

This does not mean that the launch took place without tension. With crowded hospitals and a more contagious strain ravaging the country, Britain has bet on giving more people partial protection from a single dose, rather than quickly giving fewer people complete protection from two doses.

Doctors whose booster vaccines were postponed were irritated by the approach, accusing the government of making them the subject of a new risky experiment that they fear would make vaccines less effective. Immunologists have raised concerns that a country full of people with only partial immunity could generate vaccine-resistant mutations, while Pfizer said the strategy is not supported by data collected in clinical trials.

But the idea of ​​prioritizing the first vaccines has gained some traction as countries struggling with the growing virus and scarcity in the supply of vaccines are looking for ways to obtain partial protection for their population.

For rushed doctors at the Bloomsbury clinic, the biggest challenge is simply getting a steady supply of doses.

“Our biggest problem is that we don’t know, week after week, what deliveries we’re receiving,” said Dr. Ammara Hughes, the clinical director, as she anxiously scanned her iPhone for news of the next delivery. “Logistics is difficult.”

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