Hurdles remain to be cleared as UK fires starting gun on mass vaccination

Next week will mark a momentous occasion in the brief and recent history of the COVID-19 pandemic, as vaccines are distributed throughout the United Kingdom for the first time.

Health workers who have weathered so much on the front line of the battle against the virus will be among the first to receive an injection, as will people in the older age groups, where thousands of lives have already been lost.

The UK is the first nation to green-light the use of the COVID-19 vaccine from pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech.

The nation's drug regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, or MHRA, approved the vaccine on Wednesday, just weeks after Pfizer announced the conclusion of its Phase 3 trial in late November, from which results suggested the vaccine is 95 percent effective at protecting against infection.

"The vaccine will begin to be made available across the UK from next week," Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Twitter. He said vaccines "will ultimately allow us to reclaim our lives and get the economy moving again".

The speed at which the vaccine was developed and approved is unprecedented, especially considering the treatment itself relies on a novel messenger RNA technology, rather than the traditional approach that involves weakened viral particles.

English vaccinology pioneer Richard Moxon, whose work in the 1990s led to the development of the first genome-based vaccines, said the breakthrough is a "bit like going to the moon".

"It is a great triumph for science and for all the people who have done the groundwork," Moxon told China Daily. "This is really good news, not only for coronavirus, which is obviously the pressing concern at the moment, but it also is so encouraging for all the other people making vaccines along these lines, and it opens up as a proof of concept the possibility of using these kinds of mRNA vaccines against many other infectious diseases."