Super-factory primed to churn out vaccines

£158million facility means all Britons could be given jabs against new strains in just four to five months

BRITAIN will be able to vaccinate the entire nation against dangerous new Covid strains within four months when a £158 million super-factory opens, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.

Dr Matthew Duchars, the chief executive of the Vaccines Manufacturing Innovation Centre, said the Oxfordshire facility, due to open late this year, will be capable of producing 70 million doses of an emergency vaccine manufactured entirely on British soil.

The news comes as fears grow that a new Covid-19 strain from Brazil may prove resistant to current vaccines.

“We’ll be able to make 70 million doses within a four-to-five-month period, enough for everyone in the country, when we open,” Dr Duchars said.

“New Covid variants are absolutely part of the thinking. We probably will need to make seasonal vaccine variants because there may well be mutations in the virus, as well as vaccines for other diseases.”

Under construction at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, the VMIC was conceived in 2018 and originally planned to open in 2022.

When the pandemic struck, the Government pumped a further £131million in to bring the project forward by a year.

The centre is already helping to manufacture the Oxford vaccine by lending expertise and giant bioreactors to the AstraZeneca team and its partners.

This week, Sir Mene Pangalos, the executive vice-president of biopharmaceuticals research and development at AstraZeneca, told MPs the UK’s lack of manufacturing capacity had been a major stumbling block in the development of the vaccine, and urged ministers to “urgently address” the issue.

Many of the vaccine doses being rolled out in the UK are made in factories in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Dr Duchars said the VMIC would be equipped to produce different vaccines, including MRNA varieties like the Pfizer jab, and adenovirus-based technology like the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab.

“Covid came a year early for us, unfortunately,” he said. “But when we open we’ll have a sovereign capability to manufacture different types of vaccines and still be able to make a large number of doses.

“It is a challenge. But that’s what we’re shooting for. If you don’t set yourself a tough target, then there’s no chance you can reach it.”

He added the company and its new facility could also be used to help developers of numerous other vaccines.

He said: “We may not have a facility that’s built and ready to go. But we do have people who understand how to develop and manufacture vaccines.

“So, we’ve essentially lent them out to organisations to help them with the scale-up and manufacture of Covid-19 vaccines. And we’ve been working with lots of those different organisations.”

Dr Duchars said the new centre was “technology agnostic”, meaning it could be adapted to different methods for different types of vaccine and viruses.

“What we didn’t want to do was make a facility that would be great for making the AstraZeneca vaccine, for example, but then next year a different Mers or Sars comes along,” he added.

“That’s a different type of platform and a different vaccine.

“So we’ve got to have a flexible facility that is able to make in an emergency a large amount of doses from different types of processes.”

70m The number of doses the new factory will be equipped to produce of a new vaccine within four to five months