The pharmaceutical company in Wrexham which has been manufacturing the AstraZeneca vaccine as part of the UK’s mass vaccination programme is now scaling back production.
Wockhardt, located on the Wrexham Industrial Estate, had a contract with the UK Government to produce the vaccine for the rollout during the Covid-19 pandemic.
However, the company said it will ‘right size’ the business once the contracted vaccine production schedule completes this month, leading to a number of job losses as a result.
The firm would not disclose how many jobs would be lost at the end of the rollout.
In a statement a spokesperson said: “Wockhardt is incredibly proud to have played a vital role in mitigating the global impact of COVID-19.
“We scaled up at speed to meet the urgent need to supply the vaccine, including investing and recruiting where needed to meet this demanding deadline.
“The manufacturing production schedule with the UK Government to finish AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines is close to being completed with the wide scale rollout of the vaccine across the UK population.
“This has been an unprecedented period in our sterile injectable history and we have not been operating under normal manufacturing timescales or workforce numbers.
“We therefore have made the difficult decision to now undertake a process to ‘right size’ our business to anticipate and meet the future needs of the organisation without the Vaccine work. As a business we are making every effort to keep the impact as small as possible.
“Wockhardt will continue to operate as normal manufacturing all other product lines including critical medicines into the NHS. We will manufacture to the contracted Vaccine production schedule which is due to be completed in the middle of April 2022.”
