LONDON, Jan. 4 (CNA) - Britain began inoculating its citizens with the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine against COVID-19 on Monday (Jan 4), giving the shot to Brian Pinker, an 82-year-old dialysis patient, at a hospital a few hundred metres away from where the vaccine was developed.

Six hospitals in England are administering the first of around 530,000 doses Britain has ready. The programme will be expanded to hundreds of other British sites in the coming days, and the government hopes it will deliver tens of millions of doses within months.

Last month Britain became the first country to use a different vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech, which has to be stored at very low temperatures. Britain has so far injected around 1 million people with it.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is cheaper and can be stored at fridge temperature, which makes it easier to transport and use.

Cases of COVID-19 in Britain have risen sharply in recent weeks, fuelled by a new and more transmissible variant of the virus.

On Sunday there were nearly 55,000 new cases, and in total more than 75,000 people in the country have died with COVID-19 during the pandemic - the second highest toll in Europe.