Scotland may start 24/7 vaccinations from late February as mass centres open

S cotland could roll out 24/7 C ov i d -19 va c c i n a t i o n whe n mass centres open at the end o f Fe b r u a r y o r b e g i n n i n g of March, Health S ecretar y Jeane Freeman has said.

Giving an update on the Covid-19 vaccination programme to the Scottish Parliament yesterday, she said the Scottish Government will “do what it takes” to support the vaccination rollout. She also outlined plans to vaccinate 400,000 Scots a week by the end of Februar y, with mass vaccination sites able to accommodate up to 20,000 people a day.

Resp onding to a question from S cottish Lab our MSP M o n i c a L e n n o n o n w h e n 24-hour vaccinations could begin, the Health Secretary said this will be “entirely possible” at the mass vaccination sites.

In a later briefing, Caroline Lamb, Chief Executive of NHS S cotland and S cottish Government Director General of Health and Social Care, said

NHS Scotland will work with health boards to extend vaccination hours if there is need to do so.

Of the mass vaccination sites, she said: “They will be operating seven days a week. Our current plans are from eight in the morning until eight in the evening, and that is based on the scale up of the amount of vaccine that we'll have available to us. If we find that there is demand outwith those hours then we will work with our NHS boards to extend those operating times.”

Dr Nicola Steedman, Interim Deput y Chief Medical Officer, said the aim is for Scots to be able to choose where they would like to receive a vaccine – as not everyone will be able to travel to a mass site.

Ms Freeman announced that as of the end of Tuesday, 191,965 S cots had been given a first dose of the vaccine. This means 16,023 doses were given on Tuesday, an increase on 12,565 the day before.

S o m e 2 , 9 9 0 p e o p l e h ave received a second dose of the

Pfizer vaccine, although the timetable for second doses was changed in the new year from three weeks after the first to up to 12 weeks later.

From the end of Februar y Scotland will have the capacity to vaccination 400,000 people a week, Ms Freeman said. This will involve 1,700 full-time equivalent vaccinators a day, as well as just under 1,000 support staff.

So far just over 80 per cent of care home residents have been given a first dose, along with 55 per cent of care home staff and 52 per cent of frontline NHS and social care staff. By the first week in February, all residents in care homes and staff will have been given a vaccine, along with frontline NHS and social care staff and those 80 and over, Ms Freeman said.

By mid February, those over 70 will have been given a first dose, and the aim is to deliver a dose to all those over 65 and the clinically vulnerable by the beginning of March.

Ms Freeman said Scotland will receive the first deliveries of the Covid-19 vaccine made by Moderna, the third vaccine to be approved in the UK, in early April.

She added the country is facing a “more perilous” situation than at any time during the pandemic. "While our NHS is very hard pressed, and yet again, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to our NHS and social care staff, we have more at our hand to fight this."

The Health S ecretar y said that as of yesterday, Scotland has been allocated 562,125 vaccine doses and, of these, 365,000 have arrived in vaccination centres, to health boards or to GPS.

She said some sites for mass v a c c i n a t i o n c e n t r e s h a v e already been secured, including Aberdeen Exhibition and C o n f e r e n c e C e n t r e , R ave n - scraig Sports Facility, Queen Margaret University, and the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

A further 155,025 doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 42,100 of the Oxford/astrazeneca jab are either in transit or storage, she added.

Liberal Democrat MSP Alex Cole-hamilton said Scotland's "stockpile" of nearly 200,000 doses is currently in storage in Bedford and he asked why they are not in circulation.

Ms Freeman said it is "quite wrong" to suggest doses are being stockpiled and they are d i s t r i b u t e d b a s e d o n wh a t health boards or GP practices say they need on given weeks.

Later yesterday, Public Health Scotland released additional data on vaccinations.

Up to 10 Januar y, 3.59 per cent of Scotland's population had received their first dose of the vaccine - a total of 163,177 individuals.

Just under 7 per cent of all Scots aged 80 or over were vaccinated at this point.

The data was also broken down by health board, with Western Isles having the highest vaccination coverage at 6.76 per cent of the population.

NHS Highland had the lowest coverage at 2.63 per cent of the population.

Astrazeneca said yesterday it is “imminently” scaling up to release two million doses of its vaccine per week in the UK, and may be able to go above that from April, the firm's chief executive has said.

Tom Keith-roach, president of Astrazeneca UK, said 1.1 million doses of the company's Covid-19 jab developed with Oxford University had been released to the UK to date, but the aim was to reach two million doses per week on or before the middle of February.

He told the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee: "We are scaling up very rapidly - and this will happen imminently - to releasing two million doses a week. We're absolutely on track to do that and therefore deliver tens of millions of doses in the first quarter of the year. If we average two million a week through the course of the year, that gets us to the 100 million doses that we're committed to the UK through the course of 2021."

Later, he added: "We are scaling up to two million doses a week imminently and we'd c e r t a i n l y h o p e t o b e t h e r e o n o r b e f o r e t h e mi d d l e o f February."