RACE TO ROLL OUT VACCINE Chelsea veterans salute their early Christmas pressie
Speeding up our jab programme is only way to beat mutated Covid, experts warn
THE coronavirus vaccine programme must be speeded up, politicians and business leaders said last night.
Jeremy Hunt led calls to accelerate the roll-out as the pandemic tightened its grip with a fast-spreading new variant.
‘Time is against us with this new strain so we now need a great national effort to turbocharge the vaccination programme,’ the Tory former health secretary said. ‘The logistics will be complex but I have no doubt our incredible NHS can rise to the challenge: just look at the lightning-speed Nightingale hospital building programme.’
Helen Dickinson of the British Retail Consortium said action was needed because the expansion of Tier Four controls were proving devastating for high streets.
She added: ‘The biggest Christmas gift the Government could give us all is to put even more moment um behind t he vaccination programme and more widespread testing.’
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer urged ministers to ‘pull out all the stops’ to accelerate the roll- out, adding: ‘The virus is spreading rapidly and this now a race against time with a new variant.
‘The vaccine offers the only way out of the pandemic and this cycle of lockdowns.’
More than 500,000 people have already received the first shot of the Pfizer Covid vaccine but plans for any acceleration depend on approval of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency may give it the green light soon after Christmas, according to Sir John Bell, a leading medical expert.
‘They got data quite a long time ago but that was the first set of data,’ the Oxford professor told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
‘They receive multiple sets of data. So we are getting to be about prime time now, I would expect some news pretty shortly.
‘I doubt we’ll make Christmas now, but just after Christmas I would expect. I have no concerns whatsoever that the data looks better than ever.’
The vaccine would boost efforts to control coronavirus because it is easier to distribute than the Pfizer/BioNTech jab.
The Government has ordered 100million doses, with around 40million expected to be available by the end of March.
Meanwhile, doctors warned yesterday that Nightingale hospitals cannot open because there are not enough staff to service them.
The enormous structures, which cost an estimated £220million, were hailed at the start of the pandemic as a solution to the growing crisis in hospital capacity.
But many are lying empty, with the London ExCel centre on ‘standby’ even as cases spiral in the capital. Centres in Birmingham and Sunderland are also on standby, while the site in Manchester is open for ‘non-Covid care’.
Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chairman of the British Medical Association, said: ‘We started this pandemic with serious workforce shortages, with just under 40,000 nurse vacancies and over 100,000 unfilled NHS staff vacancies. This makes it very difficult to staff the Nightingales adequately. Doctors and nurses are already overstretched and cannot be in two places at once.’
Rupert Pearse, a professor of intensive care medicine at Queen Mary University of London, said: ‘ We cannot shut down other patient services and redeploy staff to intensive care or respiratory wards as we did in the spring.’
An NHS spokesman said: ‘The Manchester and Exeter Nightingales are both admitting patients and all of the Nightingales in England are ready to support resilience in the NHS with some already being used for outpatients, diagnostics, and scans.’
‘It is the only way out of this’
FOR hundreds of Chelsea Pensioners, it was the best Christmas present they could have hoped for.
Yesterday around 300 veterans received the life-saving Pfizer jab as part of the biggest NHS immunisation drive ever.
The Royal Hospital residents, who have served in Korea, the Falklands, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and during the Second World War, included Bob Sullivan, a DDay hero.
The 98-year-old said: ‘This year has changed life as we know it, causing uncertainty and worry. Getting vaccinated against coronavirus is the best early Christmas gift we could hope for and thanks to our nursing team here and NHS staff we will have a real spring in our step as we head into our locked-down Christmas.’
Pam Richards, 88, who served with the Women’s Royal Army Corp, said: ‘The vaccine is really important. You’re not just protecting yourself, you’re also protecting everyone else.’
General Adrian Bradshaw, governor of the London i nstitution, said: ‘ Today marks a new chapter in the hospital’s battle with coronavirus.
‘With an average age of 82, the Chelsea Pensioners are in the highest priority group to receive the vaccine. We all look forward to a better 2021 when they can be out and about representing the nation’s veterans throughout the country.’
Pippa Nightingale, the chief nurse at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital who is vaccinating the pensioners, said: ‘This is a real honour, they’ve fought to protect us and now we can return the favour and help protect them.’