An apparent fall in the number of Britons being vaccinated against COVID-19 each day is down to “supply fluctuations”, England’s deputy chief medical officer has told Sky News.

Professor Jonathan Van-Tam said it “will take a few months” before vaccine manufacturers are able to produce doses in a “steady routine”, adding that “global supply restraints” have also hampered the UK’s vaccine rollout.

He said: “There are always going to be supply fluctuations. These are new vaccines, by and large the manufacturers have not made them or anything like them before.

Supply would continue to be unpredictable as the manufacturing process is “a bit like beer-making”, he said – the end product is not always the same and the yield might be different each time – so “you do get batch-size variations”.

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Nearly 18 million Britons have had at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.

However, the UK’s daily totals have dipped since the total topped 15 million earlier this month.

On Monday 22 February a total of 192,341 doses were administered across the UK – a drop from the 275,956 on the previous Monday (15 February).

Meanwhile, 141,719 doses were administered on Sunday 21 February – a fall from the 237,962 given a week before (on Sunday 14 February).

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Answering questions from Sky News viewers, Prof Van-Tam was also asked about the timetable set out in the government’s roadmap for easing lockdown – which he said he believed would “get us from where we are now… to where we want to be in the summer”.

The route out of lockdown is dependent on coronavirus cases, deaths and hospital admissions continuing to fall.

These will be constantly reviewed with five weeks between each of the four stages and a week’s notice will be given before full confirmation of each step.

He said he understood people’s frustrations with the pace of the roadmap – but said reacting “too quickly” risks “getting it wrong”, and said while the path forward is “pretty careful and pretty painstakingly cautious” he believes it is “appropriate”.

“I completely get it, I am desperate for the football to be back, but actually I would rather do this once and get it right and not have to make any U-turns or backtracking, I would rather just go slowly and steadily and get there in one go,” he said.

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