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The UK must double its vaccination target to two million a week to avoid a third wave of the coronavirus, ministers warned.
The warning comes from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in a document shared with the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).
It comes like the hospitals of England treating more patients than during the peak of the first wave and how the UK registered its highest daily increase in COVID cases, with 41,385,
The government hopes that the imminent approval of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will allow for the expansion of the vaccination program, which is currently based solely on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Around 200,000 people are being vaccinated each week and it was reported in The Daily Telegraph that volunteers will deliver at least a million hits by mid-January.
But the LSHTM article says this will not be enough to prevent a third wave of coronavirus that will be even more deadly than the first.
According to the Telegraph, the document reads: “The most stringent intervention scenario with Level 4 across England and schools closed during January and two million people vaccinated per week is the only scenario that we consider to reduce the maximum ICU load below the levels seen during the first wave. “
The government has not ruled out a new, stricter Tier 5 level of restrictions, which would close schools and universities, but Tier 4 is more likely to expand first.
Current levels will be reviewed this week and parts of the Midlands and the north are expected to enter Level 4.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and member of SAGE, said he also did not believe that the goal of one million weekly vaccinations was enough to stop the spread of the virus.
He told the Today show: “If we can hit the goal of a million a week, frankly I don’t think it’s enough.
“We will have to accelerate that if we want to cover the country.”
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History is made with the new COVID-19 vaccine
Sir Simon Stevens, Executive Director of the NHS, said: “We believe that by late spring, with the vaccine supply up and running, we will have been able to offer all vulnerable people in this country the COVID vaccine. That may provide the biggest crack in hope for next year. “
A government spokesperson said: “The UK was the first country in the world to initiate a vaccination program with the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, and due to our swift and decisive action, there has been a regular and steady supply of vaccine doses that They arrive in the UK since the beginning of December.
“Our brilliant NHS has vaccinated over 600,000 people against COVID-19, and in the coming weeks and months, the vaccination rate will increase as millions of doses become available and the program continues to expand.”
The government said in November that 40 million doses of vaccines were expected by the end of 2021, enough to vaccinate up to a third of the population, with most of them arriving in the first half of the year.
The UK has early access to 357 million doses of vaccines through agreements with various developers, but some of them have not completed trials and only one, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, has been approved for use so far.
