British business minister Kwasi Kwarteng said on Tuesday that Britain was focused on vaccinating the whole of its adult population before it would be able to provide surplus shots to others such as Ireland.

“I think our focus has to be to try and keep Britain safe, we want to work cooperatively as well with other countries but the main priority is to get the vaccine rollout,” Kwarteng told Sky News.

“If there are surplus vaccine doses then we can share them but there are no surpluses at the moment, we have still got a huge number to vaccinate.”