On Monday, Professor Stephen Powis, national medical director of NHS England, said 100 hospital hubs and 700 vaccination centres – based in GP practices and other community settings – would have access to the vaccine by the end of the week, with plans in place to expand the programme.
“We aim to get it into people’s arms as quickly as it is supplied to us,” Prof Powis said. “If we get 2 million doses a week, our aim is to get 2 million doses into the arms of those priority groups.”
Doctors on the front line of the UK’s vaccine programme have said they are “ready to go” and will be able to administer doses “very quickly” in the months ahead, amid questions over whether or not the NHS can inoculate 2 million people a week.
After suggestions that staffing constraints could hinder the roll-out of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, which was approved for use last week, NHS officials and GPs have insisted that the health service is primed to deliver doses as soon “as supply becomes available”.
A total of 530,000 doses are ready to be delivered to the UK’s most vulnerable – adding to the 1 million people who have already received a first jab.
Initially, 30 million doses were set to be manufactured by September in preparation for the roll-out – a target that was later changed to four million by the government’s vaccine taskforce.
However, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, admitted last week that just over half a million doses of the Oxford vaccine were available for distribution, adding that supplies would be rapidly increased.
The shortfall has prompted concern that the government may struggle to deliver on its aims of inoculating by April the approximately 30 million people who make up the UK’s priority list.
Labour said that “ministers should be going hell for leather to get 2 million jabs a week distributed as soon as possible and then scale up further”.
Last week, the prime minister, Boris Johnson, said supply is the “limiting factor”, while Britain’s four chief medical officers warned that “vaccine shortage is a reality that cannot be wished away”.
And in a letter sent to GPs last week that was seen by The Independent, Sir Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England, warned that there is “still some unavoidable uncertainty about the week-by-week supply phasing”.
The claims sparked a sharp response from the UK’s vaccine manufacturers, which insisted that doses are being delivered to the timetable agreed with the government.
Pfizer said the number of doses it has now sent to the UK is “in the millions”, while Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of AstraZeneca, said last Wednesday that the company would be ramping up production to provide “1 million doses and beyond” per week.
Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph reported over the weekend that the NHS had refused to commit to the target of inoculating 2 million people per week because of supply shortages and issues of logistics, citing the need to enrol an army of volunteers and prepare vaccination sites.
The NHS rejected the report, saying the “main barrier to delivery will be availability of the vaccine”. A spokesperson added: “It is completely untrue that staffing constraints are currently standing in the way of vaccine rollout.”
GPs on the front line have similarly told The Independent that the NHS is fully prepared to deliver the largest vaccination programme seen in the UK’s history.
“We do this for flu vaccine every single year,” said one GP based in London. “They’re trying to blame the workforce capacity for the lack of vaccine. It’s an absolute fallacy. This is purely about supply.”
The GP said his practice, which cares for 30,000 patients, had already given a first dose of the Pfizer vaccine to 1,000 people over three days. For influenza, he said the surgery was capable of vaccinating the same number of people in just one morning.
“The numbers sound a lot when it’s on a population level, but if you break it down by practices, it’s not that many per GP.
“It can be done very quickly. We don’t need all these people drawn in to mass vaccination centres and getting staff back in. We’ve got the staff; we’ve got the space; we’ve got the resources – we just need the vaccines. It’s as simple as that.”
Another GP said that she and her colleagues were “sitting waiting to be instructed as to when we can start”.
“The NHS can deliver this,” she said. “We have already been set up to deliver over 10 million flu jabs to the 50-64 year olds. I am confident with the right financial and manpower support we can deliver the Covid vaccines.”
She admitted that the IT system used to process patient data “isn’t fit for purpose” and needed to be improved, but added that the Oxford vaccine – which can be kept at fridge temperatures – would not pose the same logistical and storage issues as the Pfizer/BioNTech candidate.
