Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said that the company is ” aligning our delivery schedule with the government so we can progressively ramp up the vaccination programme”.
“We can [supply a million doses a week]. We are going to ramp up very rapidly in the first week, first and second week of January. Essentially we will start delivering today or tomorrow we will be shipping our first doses.”
He added that the “good news with this vaccine” is that a “good level of protection” is acquired after the first dose of the jab.
“[We can] give the second dose two to three months later and that enables us to protect many more people because we can wait 2-3 months for the second dose,” Soriot said.
“We can go to two million [doses a week]. With one dose, we will be able to inject millions of people in the first quarter, we will possibly vaccinating several million people in January.”
He added that he believes the immunisation is effective against the new variant detected in the UK.
“”Our belief at this point is the vaccine should be effective against the variant. Our colleagues at Oxford are working very hard with the NHS to confirm this. If we need at some point to develop a new vaccine, we can, but it will of course take a little point of time to develop it.”