All over-18s could have jab ‘by end of June’

Government increasingly optimistic as it gears up to inoculate 5m people a week

41,346 DAILY CORONAVIRUS CASES

-18.6% CHANGE IN 7-DAY AVERAGE

88,590 DEATHS + 1,295

EVERY adult in Britain will be vaccinated by the end of June, senior government figures hope, as they grow increasingly optimistic they will be able to accelerate the roll-out.

The Sunday Telegraph can disclose Whitehall sources believe this target could realistically be achieved as they plan to vaccinate four to five million people a week within months.

A further two vaccines in the pipeline, from Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, could help Britain speed up the process to vaccinate all 54 million adults.

A source said: “All over-18s by June – yes. It is delivery, delivery, delivery.”

While senior government figures are now privately working to this target, the Department of Health, which said yesterday it hoped to have vaccinated “tens of millions” of Britons by April, is reluctant to publicly acknowledge a deadline.

Separately, the chief executive of Britain’s new £158million government vaccine factory in Oxfordshire today tells The Sunday Telegraph it will be able to vaccinate the entire nation against dangerous new Covid strains within four months when it opens in full by the end of the year.

However, ministers are growing increasingly concerned about hitting the Government’s only public target – to offer the jab to 14.9million Britons by Feb 15 – due to manufacturing delays from Pfizer and AstraZeneca.

Other developments in the fight against the pandemic include:

♦ Armed Forces medics will spend at least two months in hospitals across the south east to help ease the pressure on front-line staff;

♦ Councils were accused of enforcing tighter lockdown measures by closing children’s playgrounds and beauty spot car parks;

♦ More than one million people aged 80 or over were invited to book a coronavirus jab at a vaccination centre, as the NHS accelerates the immunisation programme, the biggest in health service history;

♦ Boris Johnson pledged to use June’s meeting of the G7 group of industrialised nations in Cornwall to develop an “early warning system for emerging health threats – including new mutations of coronavirus”.

♦ The Trump administration in Washington published fresh claims that the virus may have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.

The bold forecasts for vaccination delivery by the middle of summer came despite supply issues at both Pfizer and AstraZeneca that have left officials with “a big supply headache”.

AstraZeneca has delayed its target of delivering two million vaccines a week to the UK from the end of this month to the middle of next month while Pfizer said late last week it was delaying deliveries to the UK to reconfigure its manufacturing sites to boost capacity from 1.3billion doses to 2billion a year.

One source said this presented “a real challenge” to hit the target set by the Prime Minister of offering jabs to 14.9 million of the most vulnerable by the middle of February, adding: “It remains tight, very tight for our targets. It was always ambitious, massively ambitious.”

A Department of Health spokesman said: “We do not recognise the ‘internal target’ referenced. Our aim is to offer priority groups 1-4 their first jab by Feb 15.

“Through the UK vaccines delivery plan we are making fantastic progress rolling out jabs as quickly as possible to the most vulnerable.”

Ministers are also optimistic that any new vaccine to fight variants which have emerged in Kent, South Africa and Brazil can be developed quickly.

Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccines minister, told MPs last week that new vaccines to fight the variants could be administered in as little as 30 to 40 days after they were first formally identified.

One Whitehall source said AstraZeneca was already looking at the new variants to see if the vaccine needed to be tweaked.

A source close to the Sage committee added: “AstraZeneca are working on a potential vaccine. They have a team in Oxford looking at it. But they haven’t got a huge amount of data to work with,

and neither do we.” The source added: “It’s likely that the second Brazil variant will already be here, although we don’t have the detected cases yet.

“The data suggests that that might affect the way that antibodies see the virus.”

AstraZeneca declined to comment on the development.

Officials have been encouraged by data from Israel that has shown a big fall in serious illness and mortality in the over-60s by 25 per cent after two weeks of vaccinating 20 per cent of the target population.

The hope now is that in the UK hospital admissions and deaths from Covid-19 will fall sharply in early March, two weeks after all of the top four priority groups in the community have been vaccinated.

One source said: “The beauty of this is if we have vaccinated the most vulnerable then actually we are in great place because the rest of the economy can begin to open up. We still have to be careful – we still have to socially distance but at least we can go back to normal and know there are no more lockdowns coming.”

Writing in today’s Sunday Telegraph, Mark Harper, chairman of the Coronavirus Recovery Group of Tory MPs, calls for a “clear road map” to lift restrictions by March 8. Mr Harper writes: “There cannot be any more excuses and there’s no need to wait until Easter. We need a clear road map to all our freedoms, economy and health prospects being fully restored.”

Mr Johnson is due to review the rules governing the third national lockdown this week. Britain has also already struck a deal for 30million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, with the option of ordering 22million more, but the vaccine has yet to win the approval of regulators.

Meanwhile, Dr Matthew Duchars, chief executive of the Vaccines Manufacturing Innovation Centre in Oxfordshire, said: “We’ll be able to make 70 million doses within a four to five month period, enough for everyone in the UK, when we open later this year.”

Last night, Mr Johnson hailed the “national effort” as data showed more than 3.5 million people had received a first dose of a vaccine in the UK.

He said: “Thank you to everyone helping in this fantastic national effort.”

‘If we have vaccinated the most vulnerable, then the rest of economy can begin to open up’