Pandemic crisis latest
Daily figure falls from 16,600 to around 13,300 over weekend
SCOTLAND’S bid to vaccinate millions of adults against Covid-19 slowed down over the weekend despite Nicola Sturgeon’s pledge to ramp up the mass rollout.
Only 40,151 Scots received their first dose of either the Pfizer or Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine in the three days from Friday morning.
An average of around 13,383 people were inoculated at sites across the country each day – a significant drop in the numbers from late last week.
The Scottish Government is aiming to deliver 400,000 immunisations a week, with all over-80s getting the jab by the beginning of February and all over70s by the middle of the month.
Lib Dem health spokesman Alex Cole-Hamilton said: ‘Millions of Scots are desperate to get the vaccine. Every day I am contacted by medical staff and care home residents waiting for their jabs, and that’s before we even get to the general public.
‘We cannot afford to amble along. This should be a 24/7 operation.’
As of 8.30am yesterday, 264,991 Scots had received their first dose of the vaccine, with 40,151 administered over the weekend. In the same period, 750,892 jabs were given to patients in England.
The Scottish Government does not publish daily figures over the weekend, meaning it is impossible to know numbers for Friday, Saturday or Sunday. But information published by officials suggests an average of around 13,383 were given on each of these days.
This is a significant dip from last Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, when 16,023, 16,242, and 16,633 jabs were given respectively.
It comes days after doctors said Scotland’s vaccine programme was being hindered by ‘patchy’ supplies – with some clinics yet to receive their first doses. Speaking at the weekend, Dr Andrew Buist, chairman of the Scottish General Practitioners Committee at the British Medical Association, said: ‘My practice has had 100 doses so far to do 600 80-plus-year-olds.
‘I have to do another 1,200 patients in the 70-plus group and extremely clinically vulnerable by the middle of February. So we need to do 1,700 vaccinations in the next four weeks. We can do that – but we need the vaccine.’
It is understood that the UK Government has so far supplied 700,000 doses of both Covid vaccines to Scotland.
Despite ramping up the rollout of the vaccination drive in Scotland, with new mass centres to be opened in the coming weeks, Miss Sturgeon has warned supply issues could slow down the programme. The Scottish Government has pledged to deliver vaccines seven days a week, with ministers considering whether a 24/7 system could be put in place. Scottish Conservative health spokesman Donald Cameron said: ‘The SNP are trailing their own targets and these latest numbers are, worryingly, even further behind where they should be.
‘The UK Armed Forces have had to be called in to boost the rollout because it’s becoming clear the SNP are straggling off the pace. The Scottish Government has received more than enough vaccine doses from the UK Government. Any supply issues are Nicola Sturgeon’s responsibility alone.’
Miss Sturgeon said the programme was on track and letters will be sent to over-70s in the ‘coming days’. She added: ‘We’re picking up the pace, we’ve set the target in terms of weekly vaccinations... inev
‘Trailing their own targets’
itably in any big programme there will be daily variations.’
Miss Sturgeon has claimed that Scotland’s slower rollout is because officials have concentrated on getting the jab to care homes first.
She said more than 80 per cent of residents and 50 per cent of staff had received the vaccination.
Miss Sturgeon added: ‘The reason why there is a slightly different pace at the moment is because we started in Scotland, as the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation recommended we did, in care homes, and taking the Pfizer vaccine into care homes and vaccinating elderly care home residents is a bit more labour-intensive and time-consuming, but we focused on that first.’
On Sunday, the Ministry of Defence announced that British Army troops were being deployed to help set up 80 vaccination centres in Scotland.
DID you get Nicola Sturgeon’s letter about vaccination, the one saying thanks for all your sacrifice during the pandemic? You might have assumed, for a giddy moment, that it was an appointment letter – but if so your hopes would have been quickly dashed.
Care home residents and health and social care staff are rightly first in line for inoculation ‘until the vaccine... becomes more widely available’. The idea of availability is mentioned again in the letter – almost as if the First Minister was getting her excuses for failure in early, with a spot of expectation management.
Her largely pointless missive ends by thanking us for ‘sticking with it’, although it’s not as if you can opt out of lockdown, at least not without risking arrest.
And for now these crippling constraints on everyday life remain in place, to the extent that even having a coffee with a friend in a park is apparently verboten.
That makes getting this vaccine out of its phials, or fridges, and into as many arms as possible all the more essential – but why on earth is it taking so long?
For weeks now, we’ve seen over80s in England getting the jab at their GP surgeries – Sir Ian McKellen, 81, who played Gandalf, was among the first to receive a dose.
Even a wizard would struggle to magic up a drop of vaccine north of the Border for older folk in the community (98 per cent of over-80s have yet to be inoculated).
Ambitious
Dr Andrew Buist of the British Medical Association has warned the vaccine rollout is being hindered by ‘patchy’ supplies, making the goal to give jabs to everyone aged over 80 by early February seem more than a little ambitious.
There are an ‘initial’ 900,000 doses of the vaccine for Scotland in January, according to Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, although only 224,840 people had been vaccinated by January 15 – 5 per cent of the population, compared with 6.3 per cent in England.
Inevitably, in the traditions of the public sector, the entire process is mired in red tape – one dentist said he’d given up registering as a vaccinator amid a barrage of paperwork.
Equality and diversity awareness is part of the training, naturally, but it means 15 hours of modules before you can even start an application.
This kind of nonsense would be a laughing matter in normal times – but when we’re battling a pandemic that has claimed thousands of lives it’s simply unforgivable, and of course avoidable.
Didn’t anyone in the planning stage (assuming there was one) point out that 15 hours of training might be excessive – indeed, for some experienced health professionals, even 15 minutes might be over the top?
In England, dentists can self-certify to vaccinate, but we do things differently here – with the net result that we’re falling far behind, despite Miss Sturgeon’s enthusiasm for ‘healthy competition’.
There are 17 mass vaccination hubs south of the Border and in Scotland we only have the makeshift hospital NHS Louisa Jordan, where health and social care workers got the jab on Saturday.
Thankfully, the cavalry is on the horizon in the form of the Army, with troops being drafted in to set up 80 vaccination centres.
Armed Forces commanders can play a vital role in getting the job done, though shouldn’t they have been drafted in earlier, given that the Pfizer vaccine was given regulatory approval at the beginning of December?
All adults should be vaccinated – or offered the jab – by September, the UK Government has pledged, while in Scotland there are some caveats – it’s all down to supply, and Miss Sturgeon is only ‘hopeful’ that this target can be met. She seems a little more ‘hopeful’ about a second independence referendum being held later this year – a good indication of where her real priorities lie.
Miss Sturgeon was rattled yesterday at her daily coronavirus briefing when she was asked about the practicalities of a May election and a Scexit vote in the autumn, saying this wasn’t the forum for ‘independence stuff’ (though in the past it has been).
Yet it emerged at the weekend the SNP had launched an ‘independence taskforce’ to be based in its headquarters and led by a ‘high-profile and experienced Yes campaigner’.
We can all breathe a sigh of relief, then – yes, this is the biggest public health emergency in living memory, but don’t worry, a crack group of experts is on hand to destroy the very mechanism that is allowing the vaccine rollout to happen, however glacially.
It will publish policy papers making the case for separation, create campaign material as part of ‘door to door activism’ when the pandemic is over, and establish a ‘national information service’ – no doubt a reliable source of data on this toughest of constitutional questions.
Crisis
In reality, it’s a no-brainer: the SNP, for purely tactical reasons, has decided it is proEU, so its ambition is to get back into that discredited club at the earliest opportunity.
Yet in the EU, vaccination rates are sluggish, stoking a growing political crisis – the UK vaccinated as many people on a single day last week as France has managed in total.
Scotland benefited from the UK Government’s early purchase of 40million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 100million of the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, even if we’re now doing our level best to make a mess of distribution.
It’s beyond shameful that we have an administration that is spending any of its time – even a nanosecond – trying to dismantle the partnership that has made mass vaccination and Army involvement possible. This is a time for cool heads, clever planning and a Stakhanovite work ethic at every level of government and public health bureaucracy.
Whether mass vaccination centres (when we get round to opening them) should operate round the clock shouldn’t be a matter for debate – they must be 24/7, and they should have been up and running by now.
It’s an abdication of the government responsibility that matters most – keeping the country and its citizens safe – for our leaders to be cooking up independence plots when so many are dying.
Meanwhile, the collateral effects of this lockdown – from shutting schools to economic devastation – are becoming more evident by the day.
It is impossible for Miss Sturgeon and her team to drop the cause that has united them (as the wider party descends into bitter factionalism), even during this epic struggle with a disease that has turned the world upside down.
With the Covid death toll in Scotland nearing 8,000, what we need is inspirational leadership, logistical nous and a government laser-focused on putting this nightmare behind us.
But what we have is a group of obsessives for whom nothing is more important than their dangerous fantasy of plunging us into another bout of constitutional turmoil.