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The professor said the Pfizer vaccine is expected "very, very shortly in the UK. And I do mean hours, not days".
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The UK was the first country to give the green light for Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and has ordered 40 million doses - enough for 20 million people.
Refrigerated transport is needed to carry the vials, which must be stored at -70C.
More from UK
Boris Johnson has warned of "immense logistical challenges" due to the cold temperature needs of the inoculation.
Image:How COVID-19 vaccines ordered by the UK compare
The Pfizer/BioNTech jab was shown in clinical trials to prevent 95% of COVID cases. And it works just as well in the elderly, who are most at risk of serious illness from the virus.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said 800,000 doses will arrive next week, while BioNTech chief commercial officer Sean Marett said the UK is likely to get at least five million before the end of the year.
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Sir Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, told a Downing Street press briefing that because of the conditions ceeded to store the jab, it can only be moved a few times and only in large quantities.
A box of the vaccine contains 975 doses, but the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has not granted approval for these containers to be split up.
This makes distribution to care homes difficult and it could see doses go to waste.
Professor Anthony Harnden, deputy chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said the vaccine priority list was made to be flexible and could react to what was happening on the ground.
Pfizer and BioNTech have said their inoculation can be sent to care homes so long as it travels for less than six hours after leaving cold storage and is put into a normal fridge.
Up to 99% of Covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths could be avoided with the first wave of vaccinations, England's deputy chief medical officer Prof Jonathan Van-Tam has said.
Speaking to BBC News, he said that would be possible if everyone on the first priority list took the vaccine and it was highly effective.
He said it was key to go "as fast" and at the "highest volume" as possible.
But he acknowledged there would need to be some flexibility in the list.
The BBC understands that some of the first delivery of the Pfizer vaccine is travelling via the Eurotunnel to the UK on Thursday.
Prof Van-Tam, who was taking viewers' questions on the BBC News channel and Radio 5 Live, said that due to technical issues around the vaccine - particularly the need to store it at very low temperatures - it would be difficult to take the vaccine to individual people's homes.
The order in which people will get the jab is recommended by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) and decided by the government.
Elderly people in care homes and care home staff have been placed top of the priority list, followed by over-80s and health and care staff.
But because hospitals already have the facilities to store the vaccine at -70C, as required, the very first vaccinations are likely to take place there - for care home staff, NHS staff and patients - so none of the vaccine risks being wasted.
Prof Van-Tam told BBC News: "If we can get through phase one [of the priority list] and it is a highly effective vaccine and there is very, very high up take, then we could in theory take out 99% of hospitalisations and deaths related to Covid 19.
"That is why the phase one list is what is, that is the primary ambition."
Prof Van-Tam said the government would need to make further decisions on how to continue with the second part of the programme, while reviewing how the vaccine performs in the coming months.
Meanwhile, Prof Anthony Harnden, deputy chairman of the JCVI, said patience was required over the rollout of the Pfizer vaccine.
Prof Harnden said the JCVI's "clear remit was to decide on prioritisation groups" but it always understood "there were going to be vaccine product storage, transport and administration constraints".
"We have advised in our statement that there is flexibility at an approach to this list according to what was actually feasible and logistical on the ground, so this is not wholly unexpected - but the clear list that we have drawn out is a list of priority in terms of vulnerability," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
Care homes 'utmost priority'
Prof Harnden said he understood delays in delivering the vaccine to care homes would be disappointing for residents and their families.
But he added: "I think just a very small degree of patience is required because I think we are at the forefront here in the UK.
"I think the very short-term practical difficulties of getting this out from a storage point of view should not let us all lose sight of the fact that these care home residents and their staff are our utmost priority - and it may well be possible to get the care home staff to be immunised within a local hospital setting," he said.
The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine offers up to 95% protection against Covid-19.
The UK has already ordered 40 million doses - enough to vaccinate 20 million people.
These will be rolled out as quickly as they can be made by Pfizer in Belgium, with the first load next week and then "several millions" throughout December, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said.
But the bulk of the roll-out across the UK will be next year.
And it could take until April for all those most at-risk to receive the new vaccine, according to NHS England chief executive Sir Simon Stevens.
The professor said he expects to receive the Pfizer vaccine "very, very shortly in the UK. And I do mean hours, not days".
Advertisement
The UK was the first country to give the green light for Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and has ordered 40 million doses.
Refrigerated transport is needed to carry the vials, which must be stored at -70C.
More from UK
Boris Johnson has warned of "immense logistical challenges" due to the cold temperature needs of the inoculation.
Image:How COVID-19 vaccines ordered by the UK compare
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said 800,000 doses will arrive next week, while BioNTech chief commercial officer Sean Marett said the UK is likely to get at least five million before the end of the year.
Sir Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, told a Downing Street press briefing that because of the frigid conditions needed to store the jab, it can only be moved a few times and only in large quantities.
A box of the vaccine contains 975 doses, but the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has not granted approval for these containers to be split up.
This makes distribution to care homes difficult and it could see doses go to waste.
Professor Anthony Harnden, deputy chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said the vaccine priority list was made to be flexible and could react to what was happening on the ground.
Pfizer and BioNTech have said their inoculation can be sent to care homes so long as it travels for less than six hours after leaving cold storage and is put into a normal fridge.
Gavin Williamson insists regional impacts of Covid will not affect exam outcomes
The Education Secretary has said students in England "won't have missed out on" teaching for the subject on which they will take exams in the Summer.
Gavin Williamson said regional differences in Covid disruption - with some students missing more face-to-face teaching than others - would not impact pupils.
Mr Williamson has defended a host of measures announced to help compensate for disruption caused to students by the Covid pandemic - denying the system leaves inequalities still between different parts of the country.
Students taking GCSE and A-level exams next year will be awarded more generous grades, receive advance notice of some topics ahead of tests, and exam aids when sitting papers.
But despite different areas experiencing different levels of disruption due to Covid infection - with some schools closing more regularly than others - Mr Williamson said "it doesn't matter" that pupils have missed teaching.
The Education Secretary told ITV News: "It doesn't matter that they [students] have missed school. Every area that they are going to be examined on, every child - wherever they are in the country - we'll make sure that that area has been fully covered."
He added: "Yes there may be some areas of the curriculum that they will probably have missed out on as a result of it [Covid] but on the areas that they are going to be examined on they won't have missed out on."
Mr Williamson said "by giving schools advance notice of the topic areas it means that they are able to use the final few months of the academic year [...] to focus that learning on those topic areas".
It is understood that grading changes simply based on the region you live in have been ruled out.
Angry students protested against the exam results and called for Gavin Williamson's resignation. Credit: PA
Additional exams will also be run to give students a second chance to sit a paper if the main exams or assessments are missed due to illness or self-isolation, the Department for Education (DfE) said.
Thousands of A-level students had their results downgraded from school estimates by an algorithm, before Ofqual announced a U-turn, allowing them to use teachers’ original predictions instead.
In October, the government announced that the 2021 exams would still go ahead in England, but that the majority of them would be delayed by three weeks to give pupils more time to catch up on learning.
Mr Williamson on Thursday defended not cancelling exams, saying they were the best measure - as opposed to teacher assessments.
Gavin Williamson tells ITV's Good Morning Britain it would not be right to cancel exams in England next year:
On Thursday, Mr Williamson unveiled a package of measures to ensure that the grades students receive are as fair as possible following growing calls for the Government to do more to compensate for missed learning.
Students will be given aids, such as formula sheets, in some exams to boost their confidence and reduce the amount of information they need to memorise, as part of the measures.
A new expert group will be set up to look at differential learning and to monitor the variation in the impact of the pandemic on students across the country.
Gavin Williamson. Credit: PA
But it is understood that grading changes simply based on the region you live in have been ruled out.
Under new contingency measures, students who miss one or more exams due to self-isolation or sickness, but who have still completed a proportion of their qualification, will still receive a grade.
If a student misses all their assessments in a subject, they will have the opportunity to sit a contingency paper held shortly after the main exam series.
These tests are expected to run in the first few weeks of July.
Credit: David Davies/PA Wire/PA Images
If a pupil has a legitimate reason to miss all their papers, then a validated teacher-informed assessment can be used but only once all chances to sit an exam have passed.
Students who are clinically extremely vulnerable will also be given the option to sit an exam at home if they cannot be in school due to restrictions.
It comes after DfE figures revealed that more than a fifth (22%) of secondary school pupils were absent from school last week for the second week running.
The DfE has also announced that full, graded Ofsted inspections will not resume until the summer term and exam results will not be included in school performance tables this year.
Credit: PA
Sats exams in Year 6 will still go ahead – except for the grammar, punctuation and spelling test – but tests in Year 2 will be suspended for a year.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, said: “In September, we were faced with secondary exams proceeding unaltered, all primary assessments going ahead as normal, full publication of performance data, and a return to inspection in January.
“This announcement brings with it some much-needed relief to school leaders who have been operating in ‘emergency mode’ for most of this year.”
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said: “This solution to next year’s A-level and GCSE exams will make them as fair as they can be in the circumstances.
“It is not perfect – nothing can be, given the fact that learning has been so disrupted by coronavirus and that pupils have been affected to vastly different extents.”
Ofqual’s interim chief regulator Dame Glenys Stacey said: “Summer 2020 results were the first pandemic results. They were unique when compared to previous years, with higher grades overall.
“We have decided to carry forward the overall level of generosity from 2020 through to summer 2021, in recognition of the baleful and continuing impact of the pandemic.
“This is an unprecedented step. Having consulted widely, we think it the right thing to do.”
Credit: PA
It is understood the level of generosity will be evened out across subjects to prevent significant differences in the number of students awarded top grades depending on the subject.
Advance notice of exam topics is not expected to be made public until the end of January so students can focus their revision period from February onwards.
But James Turner, chief executive of the Sutton Trust, said the measure would need “careful management” to ensure it does not widen existing attainment gaps “as students at more affluent schools may have better access to the resources to prepare these topics in detail and at short notice”.
Meanwhile, Bill Watkin, chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, said concerns remained about the differential impact that Covid-19 has had on pupils in different areas of the country.
He added: “More thought also needs to go into university admissions, to ensure that students in England are not disadvantaged because they are sitting exams next year, unlike their peers in other parts of the UK.”
Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, who is known for his metaphors, is asked about where we are in the penalty shootout - after previously describing the coronavirus situation in those terms.
In November, after the announcement of positive results from the vaccine trials, he said: “It’s the second penalty now, that’s also gone into the back of the net, so we’re starting to feel in a better position.”
Today the keen Boston United fan says he will give a football analogy to describe the UK's situation, saying that in the first half the away
team "gave us an absolute battering" and they got a goal, but in the 70th
minute we got an equaliser.
“We’ve got to hold our nerve now, see
if we can get another goal now and nick it. The key is not to throw it away at
this point as we’ve got the draw."
To explain what he means, he says we need more vaccines, but we
also need people to realise these “aren’t an instant ticket” to get us out of
here.
He adds that people need to continue
to follow the guidance, whether or not they have had the vaccine.
“You may have to be patient until late
spring on this one," he says.
The UK formally left the EU back in January and while trade negotiations are still ongoing, there are less than 30 days for both sides to come to an agreement before the end of the transition period on December 31.
But now, France’s top securities regulator, Robert Ophele, has urged the EU to adjust rules to avoid penalising branches of EU banks trading in London.
Under the bloc’s “derivatives trading obligation (DTO)”, EU bank branches in Britain must use an EU-based platform for trading or a platform in countries like the US which has been approved by the bloc.
British rules force UK counterparties to trade on a UK approved platform, making cross-Channel deals impractical.
Last week, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) said the clash was due to how Britain applied its own rules and it would simply monitor the market.
Warning the EU, Mr Ophele said: “If we do so it will be too late.
“The harm will have been done.
“I do hope that the European DTO can still be rapidly adjusted.”
He continued to say the bulk of trading covered by the EU rules is concentrated in London and around 70 percent of volumes handled by EU branches in the capital were at risk of being lost of moved to the US.
During negotiations, neither side has been able to come to an agreement on issues such as state aid and fishing quotas and rights.
French President Emmanuel Macron and his government made it clear to the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier that he had to push for stronger commitments on regulatory alignments and access to UK fishing waters.
Last month, Mr Macron said: “In no case shall our fishermen be sacrificed for Brexit."
But Mr Macron has since been accused of exaggerating how important UK fishing rights are to the French.
A report by the European Commission says 60 percent of all fishing is done around UK waters, in the North East Atlantic.
In France, the fishing sector is worth less than the art business at €1.4billion (£1.2billion) a year.
The 2019 report says: "By way of comparison, the overall holding capacity of the Norwegian fishing fleet was the largest in Europe.
"It was also considerably more powerful than that of any EU member state.
In the case of Iceland, despite having a much smaller fleet (1600 vessels in 2018) than France and Italy, the overall holding capacity (gross tonnage) was very similar."
As the end of the transition period looms closer, the two sides are negotiating in London for a crunch round of talks this week.
EU leaders have warned of the need to make “big progress” to avert a possible no deal by the end of the month.
