U.K. Vaccine Center Gets $159 Million Boost to Open Next Year

(Bloomberg) --

A U.K. vaccine production facility is to open in the summer of 2021, a year earlier than previously planned, after receiving a total of £131 million pounds ($159 million) in government funding to accelerate development.

The U.K. Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Center will be capable of manufacturing 70 million vaccine doses within four to six months of opening its permanent facility at Harwell campus in Oxfordshire, the center said in a statement.

The project, which is a non-profit partnership between the University of Oxford, Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, also plans to set up a temporary rapid deployment facility so that production could start as soon as as a Covid-19 vaccine is discovered.

The U.K. government has granted the project £93 million to accelerate the opening of the permanent site by 12 months, as well as £38 million for the rapid deployment facility.

“I said we would throw everything we could at finding a vaccine,” said Boris Johnson of the new funding. “There remains a very long way to go, and I must be frank that a vaccine might not come to fruition. But we are leading the global effort,” he said in an op-ed article published in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.

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