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The NHS will have to start delivering at least 2 million jabs a week starting next week if it is to comply with the government’s plan to vaccinate everyone in the four highest priority groups by mid-February.
The four groups, the prime minister said, will have a first dose of 13.9 million people in England, according to Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccine minister.
Boris Johnson’s goal involves a sharp increase in the vaccination rate, with most of the burden likely to fall on GPs, who said on Monday that staffing could limit their ability to speed delivery.
The four groups are all people over 70 years of age, plus close to 3 million health and social care workers, the clinically extremely vulnerable and around 400,000 residents in nursing homes. GPs have already been offered a £ 10 bonus for each resident of a residence who vaccinates in January.
About a million doses of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine have been administered in the last month and Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has said that 530,000 doses of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine were available to the NHS on Monday. Sir John Bell, the Oxford University professor of medicine, has said that 450,000 more doses will be received this week.
After those doses, 11.9 million more strokes will be delivered in the next five to six weeks, depending on how the government defines in mid-February. That implies an average speed of between 2 and 2.4 million doses per week.
AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said Dec. 30 that his company could provide 2 million doses a week, after delivering a million a week during the first half of the launch.
Doctors said the AstraZeneca vaccine is faster to administer and can also be more easily deployed in different locations because it only needs to be kept at refrigerator temperature, unlike the Pfizer, which must be kept at -70 ° C.
“As long as we have the vaccines, we can give them in a matter of days, so [delivery] it’s mainly due to supply, ”said Dr Richard Vautrey, chairman of the British Medical Association’s committee of GPs. “In a few weeks we should have supplies to administer the first dose to all residents of the nursing home.”
However, it is government policy to provide recipients with only the first dose of the jabs, with a 12-week interval until the second dose, rather than the two or three weeks that the manufacturers have recommended. The prime minister said that this would remove “a large number of people from the path of the virus and, of course, that will allow us to remove many of the restrictions.” It is less certain to what extent they will continue to be potential carriers of the virus.
Nursing home operators said Monday they were unlikely to lift visiting restrictions as soon as the vaccines were completed to learn more about how they affect the spread of the infection.
“It feels good to be cautious about what vaccination will mean in relation to opening homes in a big way,” said Vic Rayner, executive director of the National Care Forum, which represents nonprofit care operators.
