South Korea will extend vaccination for people aged 65 years and older with AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine to ramp up its immunisation drive, Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun told a government meeting.

The country has been rolling out the vaccine since the last week of February, beginning with the elderly and health workers, but had excluded more than 370,000 over-65s in nursing homes citing a lack of clinical trial data on the age group, Reuters reported.

Real-world data from Britain has now shown AstraZeneca and Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccines are both more than 80 per cent effective in preventing hospitalisations in over-80s after one shot.