The BBC’s medical editor Fergus Walsh will examine whether the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine has fulfilled the hopes of its Oxford creators in a documentary.

Praised as a 'remarkable example of British innovation and scientific excellence' and recognised for its success at home, around half of all adults in the UK received two doses of it.

But Mr Walsh, who has been reporting on the vaccine since its early development, looks at the challenges this jab faced in Europe and considers if when Oxford scientists developed the jab, they had far greater ambitions of a 'vaccine for the world', designed specifically to be distributed to lower income countries and sold at cost for the duration of the pandemic.

For both humanitarian and scientific reasons, creators Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert and the director of the Oxford vaccine group, Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, argued that sharing vaccines fairly globally was the best way to bring coronavirus under control.

A year later, more than 2.5 billion doses have been distributed worldwide but with only one in 20 people in low income countries double jabbed and the Omicron variant spreading globally, how far did the vaccine meet its original purpose?

Beset by challenges including supply disputes in Europe and, concerns over rare blood clots, the vaccine has never been approved in the US and is now barely used in the UK.

Mr Walsh examines how much were these problems self-inflicted, or did nationalist politics get in the way?

AstraZeneca: A Vaccine for the World? airs on BBC2 on Tuesday at 9pm.