UK nursing home residents may have to travel for vaccine, official says

A British official on Thursday said that some nursing home residents may have to travel to receive the coronavirus vaccine.

“The NHS [National Health Service], the MHRA [Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency] are working really hard right now to try and find a solution, so that we can get this into care homes if we possibly can. … At this point, there is no absolute assurance of that,” Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam told ITV’s “This Morning,” according to Reuters.

The U.K. on Wednesday became the first country to grant emergency authorization to Pfizer’s vaccine for the virus. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is set to decide on a similar authorization for the innoculation next week.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned that the government is still working out the challenges of distributing the vaccine, which must be stored in extremely cold temperatures. Van-Tam said while the drug can be kept in refrigerator temperatures for up to five days, it cannot be removed from refrigeration and replaced indefinitely.

“One thing we can’t do is … end up with a vaccine that’s been handled incorrectly and then isn’t properly viable at the end of the distribution chain,” he said, according to the news service.

Nursing home residents and workers are among those the British government has said will take priority in the initial rollout of the vaccine.

NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens added that regulators will need to sign off on splitting the vaccine’s dose packs before they can be delivered to individual facilities.

“If the MHRA … as we expect they will, give approval for a safe way of splitting these packs of 975 doses, then the good news is that we will be able to start distributing those to care homes,” he said, according to Reuters.

Philipp Rosenbaum, the senior infectious diseases analyst at data and analytics firm GlobalData, said the U.K.’s size, health care system and population density make it an “ideal” test case for distribution.

“If problems do arise, this will not bode well for distribution in countries with longer distances to vaccine distribution centers [or] less-developed infrastructure,” he said.