PRODUCTION of Covid-19 vaccines at a Welsh pharmaceutical company is to end - with a number of jobs to be lost as a result.

Wockhardt, based on the Wrexham Industrial Estate, is a global pharmaceutical and biotechnology organisation that had a contract with the UK Government to help produce Covid-19 vaccines during the mass roll-out.

Now, the rollout is coming to an end, and the company will be scaling back the work, leading to job losses.

A spokesperson for the company 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 fill 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 middle of April 2022.”