No the oxford is two doses too.
The reason it's not approved yet is they went back and redid some testing with different quantities of vaccine.
They discovered by accident almost that giving two different sized doses was actually more effective than the planned equal doses
yes, you're correct, i was thinking it was only one dose but apparently it's two, though they seem to have better efficacy with a half dose followed by a full dose, for some reason, it's been suggested that they give people one dose of the oxford vaccine to give a lower level of immunity but to cover more people, to give a damping down effect. Details in
this article here.
The big advantage with the Oxford vaccine is the storage is much simpler, it's ok long term in a normal medical fridge, the phizer one needs minus 70 and can only be moved a few times within the cold chain, which makes the logistics of mass vaccination more difficult. Vaccines have two purposes, to protect the individual, which is obvious, you have the vaccine and you will have much less chance of getting sick, but also to create herd immunity. A vaccine that was only 50% effective wouldn't be useless if it was given to enough people, because even at 50% efficacy it would prevent half of the people exposed from getting sick and hence slow exponential spread, which is how herd immunity works.
If we can get 80% of the population vaccinated particularly with the more effective vaccines, it will be much harder for the disease to spread as there will be fewer potential hosts. if a person is infected 80% of the people they meet would likely be vaccinated so the virus comes to a dead end. i think there's some merit to Blair's suggestion of giving one does to more people to get a blanket damping down effect more quickly. The problem with that approach is the vaccinated people would still have to socially distance and isolate.
ultimately, the logistics of actually administering vaccine to 65 million people in the UK is nearly as big a challenge in it's own way as the vaccine's rapid development. The thing is though that the scientists who developed the vaccines knew what they were doing, out government who we will rely on to organise the actual administration of the programme are imbeciles. I wouldn't trust them to deliver a piza, let alone a nationwide vaccine deployment strategy.