BORIS BATTLE PLAN FOR JABS

He calls in Army ++ Pledges 200,000 doses a day by end of next week ++ All care home residents to be vaccinated by end of January

BORIS Johnson last night promised at least 200,000 jabs a day by next Friday.

The Prime minister finally unveiled his ‘battle plan’ after huge pressure to speed up the vaccine rollout.

He announced a string of ambitious pledges and vowed to throw ‘everything at it’ in the coming weeks.

mr Johnson told a Downing Street press conference that hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses would be administered a day by January 15. He vowed all 420,000 care home residents would be offered a first jab by the end of the month. And he declared the expansion of vaccination sites would mean no one having to travel more than ten miles from their home for a jab.

Standing alongside a brigadier, he said the Army was deploying ‘ battle preparation techniques’ to help the nHS meet the target of vaccinating Britain’s 15million most vulnerable by mid-February. He urged everyone to

come forward when offered a jab and said a that new national booking service would make it easier to get appointments.

In the wake of Mail’s call for full transparency over the vaccine drive, Mr Johnson admitted the public had ‘a right to understand exactly how we’re cracking the problem’. And he promised a full plan would be published on Monday, alongside daily updates of vaccination numbers.

Meanwhile, figures suggested London hospitals could run out of beds within two weeks, the head of the NHS said the number of hospitalised patients had risen by 10,000 since Christmas Day and one overwhelmed hospital warned it may have to withdraw critical care. It came as:

■ The UK recorded 1,162 deaths yesterday – its second highest daily toll since the start of the pandemic;

■ The Army deployed 130 soldiers to help the NHS;

■ Ministers said all travellers would be banned from entering the UK from next week without a negative test within 72 hours of departure.

■ Teachers complained schools were becoming overcrowded with children of key workers;

■ It was announced two routine arthritis drugs will be used to treat Covid patients;

■ NHS England was in discussions with regulators to allow the Oxford vaccine to be administered from any GP surgery - not just ‘hubs’;

■ Care homes may have to take in hospital patients to help the NHS cope;

■ It emerged nearly 50,000 NHS staff are off sick with coronavirus or self-isolating;

■ Britain’s heroes were applauded on doorsteps as the weekly clap for the NHS and key workers returned.

The vaccination rollout will include more than 1,000 GPled

sites, 223 hospitals, seven mass vaccination centres and a first wave of 200 community pharmacies providing the jabs by the end of next week.

But amid reports yesterday of shortages and delivery delays to some GP surgeries, the Prime Minister admitted

‘Bumps along the road’

there would be ‘bumps along the road’. He said the UK was embarking on a ‘national challenge on a scale like nothing we’ve seen before’ but insisted: ‘If all goes well, these together should have the capacity to deliver hundreds of thousands of vaccines per day by January 15. And it is our plan that everyone should have a vaccination available within a radius of ten miles.’ Last night, a Government source said the PM was ‘very confident’ vaccinations would top 200,000 a day by next Friday. But the source warned progress would be ‘ bumpy’ in the coming weeks, with numbers fluctuating according to the availability of vaccine supplies.

‘We are setting ourselves a huge challenge,’ the source said. ‘Some things won’t go perfectly, but we are going to throw everything at it.’

Health leaders warned many hospitals are now on the brink due to soaring numbers of virus patients alongside the usual winter pressures.

Sir Simon Stevens, head of NHS England, said there were 50 per cent more people in hospital for coronavirus than during the first peak in April. London alone was dealing with 800 new admissions a day, he told the briefing. But he said the UK had made good progress with the vaccine programme, administering four times more jabs than Germany and 300 times more than France. He said the NHS had 39 days to meet the PM’s target, with 80,000 trained volunteers ready to help.

Almost 1.5 million people have now been vaccinated in the UK, including 1.26 million in England, in what some have labelled a sluggish start.

The Mail has shone a light on a string of issues with the vaccine rollout, which is critical to limiting the toll of the pandemic and easing restrictions nationwide.

The PM last night admitted it was the public’s ‘right to know’ what was happening with the jabs. He said: ‘I know there’s now one question at the very top of your minds and that is how fast and how effectively, we can get these millions of new vaccines into the arms of the most vulnerable.’

Yesterday, the Hancock appeared to add caveats to pledges to vaccinate 15million people by February 15.

He told MPs the target is actually for 15million to have been ‘offered the jab’ and not necessarily to have had it.

TO Matt Hancock and his press officers, it must have seemed the perfect opportunity to showcase the Covid vaccine rollout.

With the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab being distributed to GPs for the first time, the energetic Health Secretary was despatched to a surgery to celebrate the milestone.

TV cameras were primed. What could possibly go wrong? The answer: The involvement of Britain’s hopelessly cumbersome quangocracy.

While the minister made it to the clinic, the inoculations did not. They were stuck in a tangle of red tape, delayed by 24 hours and leaving elderly patients (and Mr Hancock) deeply frustrated. What a farce!

At the same time, Public Health England was hubristically boasting how it had delivered every order ‘on time and in full’.

This braggadocio is demonstrably untrue. Across Britain, pensioners are having desperately needed immunisation appointments cancelled because doctors have not received stocks.

Mr Johnson later brushed off these setbacks as ‘lumpiness and bumpiness’.

Distributing the jabs is a fiendishly complicated logistical task on an unrivalled scale. But this is a race against time with an unremitting enemy. Yesterday, another 1,162 coronavirus deaths were recorded.

So it’s welcome the Army, with its exemplary ‘can- do’ attitude, has been commandeered to help.

And the PM’s target of administering hundreds of thousands of doses every day by next Friday is admirably ambitious.

Mass vaccination is the only way out of these stultifying lockdowns. Then we can finally focus on fixing the enormous economic and social damage inflicted.

Britain was impressively first out of the blocks with a vaccine strategy. Since then, we have stumbled. We mustn’t fall behind. Lives, and livelihoods, depend on it.