Use pubs, polling stations and offices, urges Blair

TONY Blair urged Boris Johnson to open up thousands of polling stations and empty offices as coronavirus vaccination centres.

The former prime minister (pictured below) said there was a need to dramatically accelerate the vaccine programme to ‘save our economy’.

He called for a shake-up at the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and for the Government to step in to assist the production of glass vials which are needed for the vaccines.

Mr Blair demanded much greater transparency on who was due to get jabbed when – to maintain public confidence. And he called for more pharmacists and GP surgeries to deliver jabs.

Mr Blair said his plan would see 5million a week being delivered by the end of March – meaning more than half of the population would have been vaccinated by then. ‘No one doubts the monumental scale of the Covid-19 challenge, nor the specific task of rolling out mass vaccinations,’ the former leader said in a foreword to a report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. ‘The NHS has done an extraordinary job to get this many people vaccinated so far. But the reality is… we need to go on to an entirely new footing and accelerate this programme dramatically. ‘Public confidence would also be greatly boosted by being fully transparent about the plan to achieve this.’ Mr Blair said there were 50,000 polling stations which should be used, as well as empty offices and even pubs. He said surgeries should operate for longer hours and called for red tape to be cut to allow 5,500 pharmacists to provide the vaccine.