1,000 vaccine hubs
Boris vows to speed up jab rollout in race to hit his goal
BORIS Johnson pledged to establish 1,000 vaccine hubs this week and seven mass inoculation centres next week as pressure mounted on him to speed up the jab’s rollout.
He said the extra infrastructure would help deliver two million vaccinations a week to the most vulnerable.
More than 1.3million people in the UK have now been vaccinated with either the Pfizer or Oxford AstraZeneca vaccines.
The figure includes 23 per cent of over80s in England. But MPs warned him that nothing less than a ‘national mobilisation’ would enable him to meet his target to vaccinate 13 million by mid-February.
In a national broadcast, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer demanded ‘round the clock’ jabs to beat Covid-19. Mr Johnson said the Government would publish daily vaccination figures from Monday to give ‘maximum possible transparency’ about the rollout. He said the data will allow people to see ‘day by day and jab by jab how much progress we are making’.
He repeated his pledge that 13million people in the most vulnerable categories - older care home residents and staff, everyone over 70, all frontline NHS and care staff and all those who are clinically extremely vulnerable – will receive their jabs by mid-February.
‘To help us with meeting this target we already have 595 GP-led sites providing vaccines, with a further 180 coming on stream later this week,’ he said.
‘We have 107 hospital sites – with a further 100 later this week. So that’s almost 1,000 sites, vaccination sites, across the country by the end of this week.
‘And next week we will also have seven vaccination centres opening in places such as sports stadia and exhibition centres.’
Sir Keir said the vaccine provided hope of a ‘way out of this nightmare’. But he added: ‘We now need a government that’s worthy of the British people.
‘That means using this lockdown to establish a massive, immediate and round-the-clock vaccination programme to deliver millions of doses a week by the end of the month in every village and town, every high street and every GP surgery.
‘We need our businesses and public services working hand in hand for the common good. We need an army of volunteers and to use every resource at our disposal.
‘This is now a race between the virus and the vaccine. And if we pull together as a nation, we can win. We were the first country in the world to get the vaccine. Let’s be the first in the world to get our country vaccinated.
‘ We need a new contract between the Government and the British people: the country stays at home, the Government delivers the vaccine.’
Andrew Bridgen, Tory MP for North West Leicestershire, added: ‘ The Government has delivered Brexit and now they must concentrate on delivering Covidexit. This will require a full national mobilisation to accelerate all aspects of the vaccination programme.
‘The Prime Minister has pledged that 13million vulnerable people will be vaccinated by the middle of February. That will require the mobilisation of retired doctors and nurses, of vets, and of the Army. We need to mobilise every arm of the state as well as making proper use of volunteers.’
Business leaders also piled pressure on the PM to speed up the rollout. Lord Simon Wolfson, a Tory peer and chief executive of fashion retailer Next, said: ‘The faster a vaccine can be rolled out, the faster the economy can return to normal.’
Professor Martin Marshall, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said: ‘It’s essential that vaccine sites have access to clear, concise and up-to-date guidance about how to best deliver the vaccine to patients safely and efficiently – and information about supply with as much notice as possible so that they can make necessary and feasible preparations to ensure the rollout is as smooth as possible.’
‘National mobilisation’
ASERIOUS crisis demands serious expertise. When foot-and-mouth disease swept across Britain 20 years ago, the Government had no hesitation in sending in the Army.
Their response was magnificent. With implacable efficiency, from the squaddies to the top brass, they set about bringing a chaotic, dangerous situation under control.
One man above all symbolised the Army’s quiet determination to avert complete catastrophe. His name was Brigadier Alex Birtwistle, a 53-year-old veteran of conflicts around the world.
As Commanding Officer of the North-West’s 42 Brigade, he set about the grim business of training slaughtermen, digging burial pits and building pyres, while co-ordinating the movements of everyone in Cumbria’s farming community.
Emergency
I look now at the looming mess of the coronavirus vaccine programme and I believe there is only one practical hope: we need another Brigadier Birtwistle.
As much as anyone, I want the roll-out of the vaccines to be a total success. No one in any public position should be seeking short-term political advantage from this. It’s a national emergency with countless thousands of lives at stake, as well as the stability of the NHS itself.
I’m not interested in negative criticism. My only concern is to offer my experience, as a former Home Secretary and shadow Health Secretary.
What we need now is a military operation on a scale never seen in peacetime, something comparable to the 1940 rescue mission at Dunkirk that saved the British forces. Nothing less will deliver the Government’s stated aim of delivering two million vaccinations a week until the whole country has collective immunity.
At the moment, I see no sign of that military operation. What I see instead is a morass of red tape and incompetence. That was typified by the frustrating decision to cancel the second jab for hundreds of thousands of people who had already received the first dose.
I understand why second jabs are on hold because the expert view is to give as many people as possible a single vaccination, which may provide 90 per cent effectiveness, rather than giving only half as many people two injections, which would offer about 95 per cent Covid resistance. It’s a numbers game.
But what made no sense was to schedule those second appointments, and then cancel them. The practical, common-sense approach would be to do the second round of jabs for those who were already booked in.
Instead, we had the worst of both worlds, with centres obliged to scrap thousands of appointments and waste untold energy on telling people that plans had changed.
One London GPs’ surgery I know faced a mad dash to ring 1,000 patients to tell them not to come in, then to contact a further 1,000 and ask them to attend instead — all in the space of a few days.
Those patients were mostly elderly, in their 80s and 90s — many unlikely to use mobile phones for texting, or even to have an email account.
Contacting them all would have been a mammoth task, preventing many staff from doing anything useful towards the frontline effort.
Little wonder the surgery decided to ignore the new guidance and press ahead with delivering their scheduled second doses.
They used their common sense. And that is one thing that the Army can be relied upon to deploy in lorryloads. They won’t waste time on fruitless tasks.
But anyone who witnessed the Government’s U-turn on children returning to school will fear that common sense is in lethally short supply in Westminster.
On Sunday evening, parents were being urged to take their children to school as planned.
Within 24 hours, they were told classrooms would be largely shut until half-term at the earliest.
Britons have responded with magnificent stoicism to the punishing restrictions of the past nine months. But we need to be able to see light at the end of the tunnel — and at the moment, the tunnel just keeps getting longer.
We knew in November that a vaccine was imminent, which is why we should have been planning for the roll-out long before Christmas.
Matt Hancock and his team should have been working night and day, preparing for the big push. We need tens of thousands of trained volunteers, who should have been available rather than being held up by bureaucratic regulations and red tape.
When I was shadow Health Secretary in the early Nineties, what was starkly clear was the mismatch between the excellence of medical staff in the NHS, and the awfulness of the bureaucratic structures that stifled and constricted them.
Initiative
The situation is even worse today, with an administrative jungle that surrounds and invades every aspect of the Health Service.
Thanks to the overwhelming weight of administration bearing down from the top and too often sapping the innovation and initiative of the people doing the real work, we face problems that other countries do not — problems of our own making.
In Israel, more than a tenth of the population has been vaccinated already. In India, where a huge vaccine production plant has been set up, the health service has stockpiled 50 million doses.
In Britain, by contrast, we have a shortage of glass vials for storing and transporting the medicine — it seems no one realised the vaccine needed to be packaged.
I have no doubt there are excuses. But excuses do not save lives. India can do it — so should we, if necessary by commandeering every facility in the country. We would do no less in wartime, and we face a comparable threat.
What frustrates me most of all is knowing how many skilled and capable people are eager to be put to work. Take the St John’s Ambulance Brigade, a familiar sight at football grounds up and down the country before the pandemic.
They have been asked to organise 100 centres with 30,000 volunteers. But such a logistical challenge is scarcely their area of expertise.
Their members are peerless at providing hands- on care, and would doubtless be ideal for giving the jabs. But don’t ask them to set up the network of centres, too.
Risks
It’s equally frustrating to expect volunteers to complete mountains of paperwork before they are permitted to start vaccinating.
At the moment, they are expected to provide proof of 21 different documents, including ‘Prevent’ counter-terrorism awareness training.
Health and safety to avoid risks to the patient and themselves is one thing; learning ergonomics is another — after all, they will be under the supervision of doctors and nurses.
It’s symptomatic of how bureaucracy too often takes precedence over healthcare at every level of the NHS, and we cannot afford to indulge this nonsense.
The past nine months have been a catalogue of incompetence, from the horror of inadequate PPE in hospitals and care homes to the embarrassment of track-and-trace.
The public has endured everything, because everyone understood that these were exceptional times.
But Britain will not continue to tolerate indecision, inconsistency and incompetence.
The vaccination programme is the most important health intervention of our lifetime — and if it goes badly wrong, the public will give up complying with the Government’ s strictures on Covid.
Lord BLunkett was shadow Health Secretary from 1992-94