Vaccine staff offering ‘spare’ jabs to friends

NHS vaccine centres are offering Covid jabs to friends and family aged under 70 in breach of national policy, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Last night, senior NHS sources threatened to take disciplinary action against hospitals and GPS across the country that are offering leftover jabs to relatives and friends outside the top four priority cohorts.

Health bosses have insisted that drawing up a “friends and family list” helps avoid waste by ensuring that they never throw away any Pfizer vaccine, which comes in boxes of 975 doses and can only be stored for five days once thawed.

However, ministers are understood to be determined that younger people with a connection to NHS staff should not be allowed to “jump the queue” over the vulnerable and elderly.

Last night, a Whitehall source said that vaccine centres must do more to create “a back-up list” of patients and staff within the top four cohorts who can receive jabs at short notice. It came as the Government announced a new record-high number of 491,970 first doses administered in just 24 hours, taking the total number who have received a first dose to 6.35million, almost 10 per cent of the population.

The Government will today announce that it will pay community vaccine champions to help persuade their peers in minority ethnic groups to

take up the offer of a jab. Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccines minister, will also write to BAME MPS expressing his concern about low take-up of the vaccine among certain groups.

Meanwhile, ministers launched a review last night after Levi Bellfield, 52, Milly Dowler’s killer, was among highsecurity prisoners told they would shortly be invited for vaccines.

NHS bosses are understood to be concerned at the number of vaccination sites giving away leftover jabs to friends and family in defiance of the Government’s priority list.

Friends and family of NHS staff aged under 70 are understood to have been invited by vaccination centres in parts of Kent, Essex, Buckinghamshire and South London, to avoid wasting jabs.

One source alleged that staff working at an NHS hub in Liverpool had been allowed to vaccinate relatives and friends aged as young as 30.

Nottingham University Hospital is among a number of sites operating a “friends and family list” to receive spare doses. Health workers are understood to have invited relatives and friends of staff in their 50s to come forward for spare jabs last week. A spokesman for the hospital last night admitted that it operated a friends and family scheme for staff, but insisted jabs had only been offered to those over 80. “If people outside those groups have been invited, then we will have to investigate that,” a source added.

Staff at Warrington Hospital in Cheshire have reportedly been allowed to nominate people to receive leftover vaccine as long as they belong to any of the Government’s nine priority groups.

Charlotte Nichols, the MP for Warrington North, told the i newspaper: “If these doses are otherwise going to

‘If people outside those groups have been invited, then we will have to investigate that’

waste, and provided therefore no one higher on the JCVI priority list is being denied their dose as a result, then it is right in my view that who these doses are distributed to is at the hospitals’ discretion.”

A senior NHS source said vaccinating family and friends aged under 70 was against national guidelines and would result in disciplinary action.

Earlier this month, Prof Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, said that in some cases health workers had taken understandable steps to “eke out” the maximum number of vaccinations.