British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has warned that the world would not be adequately vaccinated until 2024 unless other countries joined Britain in donating shots to poorer nations, an effort that could bring that date forward to the middle of next year.

Raab told Reuters that Britain, which has fully vaccinated 71 per cent of its adults, was ready to begin delivering nine million doses of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines this week to countries including Indonesia, Jamaica and Kenya.

"We know on the current trajectory, the world will only be adequately vaccinated at 2024, at the end," he told Reuters at the Oxford Biomedica factory. "We want to get that date back to the middle of next year and that will make a massive difference to those countries affected."

Britain will in general give 20pc of its shots directly and 80pc via Covax, a scheme which Raab praised as giving "the poorest, most vulnerable countries around the world" the vaccines they need.