Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 23 December 2020
No, I cannot give a definite date for that because, as I keep saying, it is dependent on vaccination supply. I explained that the problem that we have across the four nations of the UK is with the predictability of delivery. We know when the vaccine leaves the Pfizer factory in Belgium but we cannot say that it will be with us in Scotland four days from that date, because the date varies depending on the different safety checks that have to take place before the vaccine reaches us.
All four nations are trying to work with the MHRA and our distributors to smooth the process and make it much more predictable so that we can forward plan on a better basis, but until we do that it is not possible to be definitive about specific dates by which certain things will be done.
What I can say is what I said in my statement: significant progress is being made. We continue to work our way around all the care homes and their staff and residents and we intend to have completed the first and second doses by the end of January. Members should remember that, when I give numbers about the volume of doses that we expect to receive, that needs to be halved to give the number of people whom we can vaccinate, because the MHRA requires us to hold back 50 per cent so that we can give people the second dose.
I do not know who the provider that the member referenced is. Nobody has raised that issue with me. If the member wants to advise me of that provider’s particular concerns, I will be happy to look at them. I think that the delivery across our boards of our vaccination programme, which began on 8 December—a very short time ago—has been remarkable, given its smoothness and the coverage that has been reached. Depending on vaccine supply, we will keep scaling that up and vaccinating more and more people according to the JCVI advice.