September deadline for initial dose of vaccine, says Raab
EVERY adult in the UK will be offered a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine by September, Dominic Raab has pledged.
The Foreign Secretary said it would be “great” if the roll-out could be faster, but the Government was working to the early autumn target. He told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge on Sunday: “Our target is by September to have offered all the adult population a first dose. If we can do it faster than that, great, but that’s the road map.”
Mr Raab’s pledge came amid dire warnings about the “extreme pressure” on the NHS, as it was revealed yesterday that a coronavirus patient is admitted to hospital “every thirty seconds”. NHS England chief executive Sir Simon Stevens said: “Since Christmas Day we’ve seen another 15,000 increase in the in-patients in hospitals across England, that’s the equivalent of filling 30 hospitals full of coronavirus patients.
“Staggeringly,” he added, “every 30 seconds across England another patient is being admitted to hospital with coronavirus.”
However, Sir Simon said the NHS in England is vaccinating at a rate of “140 jabs a minute” and will start testing ‘24/7’ vaccinations in some hospitals in the next ten days.
More than 3.5 million people in the UK have now received their first dose of a vaccine, and some 324,000 doses of coronavirus vaccines were administered in the space of 24 hours.
Mr Raab said the Government hoped that 88% of those most at risk of dying from coronavirus would receive their first jab by the middle of February – with 99% by the early spring. After then, he suggested, lockdown restrictions could be gradually eased – with a possible return to the tiered system.
“I think it is fair to say it won’t be a big bang, if you like; it will be done phased, possibly back through the tiered approach that we had before,” he told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show. When pressed on whether there would be enough vaccine supply for someone to get their second dose within 12 weeks, he said: “We ought to” be able to deliver.
Mr Raab also dismissed claims that the Government had been “too slow” in setting up border measures to prevent the importation of new coronavirus variants. He told The Andrew Marr Show: “I don’t accept that we have been too slow in this – we are broadly the same pace in terms of Canada and Germany.”
The Foreign Secretary added that “all the potential measures” would be kept under review, when asked about quarantine hotels.
The Government said that a further 671 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of yesterday, bringing the UK total to 89,261. The Government also said that, as of 9am yesterday, there had been a further 38,598 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK.