Imam Qari Asim told the PA news agency: “Misinformation can result in someone losing their life and it is one of the core principles of Islam that protection of life is extremely important.
“My message to Muslim communities is that it is our ethical obligation, moral duty, to take the vaccine whenever the opportunity arises.”
– MYTH: Vaccines make you infertile
FACT: Professor Lucy Chappell, a consultant obstetrician specialising in women with medical problems in pregnancy, says it is understandable that there have been questions about the new vaccines but said that fearful claims, which can be found online, have never been substantiated.
Maheshi Ramasamy, one of the women scientists behind the Oxford vaccine, gave a good reply when a BBC presenter expressed his surprise: “My God, science is cool now!”
Ramasamy, who has been the lead in the adult clinical trials of the vaccine, laughed: “I have always thought science is cool.”
In a way, it is not surprising that Ramasamy, 43, who was born in Sri Lanka and is the daughter of two scientists, took up science as a career.
Her mother Samaranayake Ramasamy and father Ranjan Ramasamy met when they were science students at Cambridge. In time, their daughter read medicine at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and did her DPhil at Wadham College, Oxford.
For the brilliant Britons who wrote their names into the history books yesterday, the evening of Sunday, November 22 will be forever etched in their memory.
Burnt out after toiling around the clock with microscopes and pipettes for 11 months, the scientists and doctors – most of them women – were enjoying some rare downtime in homes dotted around Oxfordshire when they received the call they had prayed for, confirming the vaccine was effective.
Professor Sarah Gilbert, the 58-year-old mother of triplets who designed it, recalls how she was quietly reading a book when the phone rang with the joyous news.
Biologist Catherine Green, who created the cell culture from which the first doses were made, admits to being so overcome with emotion that she ‘had a good cry’. The next morning she awoke to find a magnum of ‘English fizz’ on her porch.
Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine: Bogus reports, accidental finds - the story of the jab
image captionProf Teresa Lambe, who designed the vaccine over a weekend
In the early hours of Saturday 11 January, Prof Teresa Lambe was woken up by the ping of her email. The information she had been waiting for had just arrived in her inbox: the genetic code for a new coronavirus, shared worldwide by scientists in China.
She got to work straight away, still in her pyjamas, and was glued to her laptop for the next 48 hours. My family didn t see me very much that weekend, but I think that set the tone for the rest of the year, she says.