Key facts about the COVID-19 vaccination programme in the UK

Following the publication of last month's editorial (Tang and Morgan, 2021), the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) approved two other COVID-19 vaccines and the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) amended its recommendations on the dose interval for both Pfizer and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines.

The aim of this article is to address some of the common questions raised by paramedics and other health professionals. This should provide additional information to ensure health professionals have sufficient information about the UK COVID-19 vaccination programme to support their patients to make an informed decision about the vaccine.

Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca and Moderna have manufactured three COVID-19 vaccines currently approved by the MHRA for use across the UK.

Both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are using the new messenger RNA (mRNA) technology by injecting SAR-CoV-2 mRNA (Baden et al, 2020; Walsh et al, 2020). On the other hand, the AstraZeneca vaccine uses the recombinant DNA technology and non-replicating adenovirus cells encoded with the DNA of SARS-CoV-2 Spike glycoprotein are injected into the vaccinated person (Folegati et al, 2020). Both of these would trigger the production of SARS-CoV-2 S antigen in the vaccinated person and the presence of SARS-CoV-2 S antigen in the vaccinated person post vaccination will stimulate the host immune response and induce the production of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 infection.