Blair offers plan to ‘accelerate jab programme’

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

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

He called for a shake-up at the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) and for the Government to step in to assist the production of glass vials necessary for vaccine manufacture.

Mr Blair demanded much greater transparency from ministers on who was due to get jabbed when – to ensure public confidence is maintained. And he called for more pharmacists and GP surgeries to be opened up to deliver the jab.

Mr Blair said his plan would see five million jabs 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 we face in general, 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. The reality is, because of the new variants of the virus, to get out of severe lockdown and save our economy and our NHS we need to go onto an entirely new footing and accelerate this programme dramatically.

‘Public confidence would also be greatly boosted, setting out planned timetables, vaccines given, produced and delivered, settings for vaccination and categories of vaccinators.’

Mr Blair outlined a number of ways to ensure the vaccines can be delivered as efficiently as possible.

He said that there were 50,000 polling stations across the UK which should be used, along with drive-through vaccination sites.

The f ormer Labour l eader said GP surgeries should operate for longer hours to provide vaccines – at present only half of GP surgeries have signed up to do so.

He called for red tape to be cut to allow 5,500 pharmacists to provide the vaccine, including Tesco pharmacies.

Mr Blair also called on ministers to recruit furloughed people to deliver the vaccine.