PM: JAB GIVES HOPE TO TENS OF MILLIONS
But Boris says restrictions could get tougher as new vaccine is rolled out today
BORIS Johnson has pledged mass Covid jabs will be stepped up from today – but also warned virus restrictions might be toughened.
As six NHS trusts prepared to deploy the Oxford-Astra Zeneca vaccine, the Prime Minister said “hundreds of millions” of doses will be administered soon with hundreds of GP- led surgeries and health centres
starting to inoculate patients this week. Experts expect nearly a million doses of the new vaccine will be available today, with “tens of millions more next three moths”, according to Mr Johnson. More than 730 jab sites have been set up and the total will top 1,000 this week.
The injections will be given in hospital hubs to NHS and care staff and older patients, with local teams and GPs signed up to the scheme across the UK. The latest phase of the programme to protect the most vulnerable and let restrictions begin to be eased in the spring comes after more than a million doses of the alternative Pfizer vaccine were used.
Mr Johnson was optimistic the mass vaccination is on course but said he was “reconciled” to stricter Covid rules to curb a super- contagious virus mutation. Refusing to rule out extradraconian “Tier 5” measures, he said: “It may be that we need to do things in the next few weeks that will be tougher in many parts of the country; I’m fully, fully reconciled to that.
“We can see the way ahead, we can see what’s coming down the track in terms of a route forward for our country. We can see how we’re going to get out of this with great clarity now, we can see how the vaccines can really, really help us to beat this, but we do have a tough period ahead,” the PM said on BBC1’ s Andrew Marr Show. He added: “Everybody’s working flat out to do this. We’re greatly in advance of all comparable countries. We’ll be able to do tens of millions in the course of the next three months.”
Mr Johnson anticipated that a third vaccine, from US firm Moderna, will be approved for UK use soon.
Despite the accelerating inoculations, he warned of tighter restrictions such as more school closures: “There are obviously a range of tougher measures that that we would have to consider. I’m not going to speculate now about what they would be but... clearly school closures, which we had to do in March, is one of those things.” Pressed on if a “Tier 5” regional alert might be introduced, the PM told Mr Marr: “You’ve spoken about Tier 5, I haven’t said that. But there are obviously a range of tougher measures.
“What we are doing now is using the tiering system, which is a very tough system and, alas, probably about to get tougher to keep things under control. But, we will review it. And we have the prospect of vaccines coming down the track in their tens of millions. And that, I think, is something that should keep people going in what I predicted, back on your show in October, will be a very bumpy period right now.”
Tens of thousands of current and ex- NHS staff applied to be vaccinators and have completed online training. GPs and local vaccination services have been asked to ensure all care home residents in their area are inoculated this month. Amid reports of red tape stopping staff returning to the front line, Mr Johnson promised “absurd” form- filling such as rules on fire drills was being axed.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he was “delighted” at the vaccine rollout, calling it a “testament to British science. This is a pivotal moment in our fight against this awful virus and I hope it provides renewed hope to everybody that the
end of this pandemic is in sight. We will rapidly accelerate our vaccination programme.”
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer last night urged a second national lockdown of England today.
“We can’t allow the Prime Minister to use up the next two or three weeks and then bring in a national lockdown which is inevitable.
Do it now. That’s the necessary first step to get the virus back under control,” he added.
A No 10 source said: “We have moved more areas into Tier 4 to bear down on the new variant and escalated other areas into Tier 3. This targeted approach is the right one, and is kept under review.” The source added the only difference between
Sir Keir’s proposal and the current Tier 4 restrictions was that zoos would have to close.
In Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon summoned the Scottish Parliament for an emergency sitting today to announce extra restrictions.
Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, was confident AstraZeneca can supply two million doses per week within “a relatively short time frame”. But he told Times Radio that was too low a target, as around 26 million people would need to be vaccinated to protect all high- risk groups. He added: “I think Easter probably is a reasonable time to start thinking about at least moderate returns to normality.”
Hospitals starting to administer the jab include the Royal Free and Guy’s and St Thomas’s Trust in London, Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals, Oxford University Hospitals, University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay and the George Eliot Hospital in Nuneaton.
A further 454 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid, bringing the toll to 75,024, as 54,990 more lab- confirmed cases took the total outbreak to 2,654,779.
WITH the Covid toll worsening by the week, and the new variant spreading, it has been a grim start to the year. Tighter restrictions loom, including further school closures, and we may yet move into the ominous- sounding “Tier Five”.
But there is cause for hope. Today we heard the welcome news that PM Boris Johnson has promised “hundreds of millions” of vaccine doses, delivered by a growing number of NHS hospital trusts, GP surgeries and health centres.
Around a million doses of the OxfordAstraZeneca vaccine should be available today, along with a million of the alternative Pfizer one – and they are soon to be followed by a third jab, from US firm Moderna. That alone is admirable and extraordinary, given that the first vaccine was only given less than a month ago.
But the urgency of the vaccination programme cannot be understated. It has been suggested that we’ll need to perform tens of millions of vaccinations in the next three months, with a target of 26 million people vaccinated in order to achieve a significant lowering of our national risk.
To do this we’ll need to ramp up facilities and get rid of the red tape that is stopping retired doctors from coming back to give us the jab. With resolution and the will of the people, we may then be able to have the Easter break we all pine for so desperately.