Meeting of the Parliament 19 November 2020
I am grateful to Mr Cameron for his questions. I am sure that, having listened to the statement, he understands that there are some parts of his questions that I cannot confirm.
I cannot confirm the details of transportation because, for example, with regard to the first vaccine that has come successfully through stage 3 trials and is now being considered by the regulatory bodies, we do not know all of its components, which will determine the nature of transportation and the vaccine’s stability through that. That is part of what I meant when I talked about “unknowns”.
That information is coming through to us on a regular basis. My officials are involved in all those discussions at the UK level, including those with the Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation. Later today there will be another four-nations health ministers call in which all of us—because we are all grappling with the same unknowns—will work through how much more we know at this point. That is why I have committed today to updating members on that information regularly.
That applies to answering Donald Cameron’s question about exactly how we will deliver the vaccine in care homes. We intend to take the vaccine to care homes and to vaccinate in each care home both the staff and the residents. Necessary elements of doing that are being dealt with, such as gaining appropriate permissions from people to be vaccinated. However, we need to know the properties of the vaccine, the packaging that it will come to us in and whether we can transport it. For example, can we transport the Pfizer vaccine from its very-low-temperature storage facility to individual care homes? If we can, given the package sizes, do we need more than the 22 commercial storage freezers that we currently have? Do we need those in smaller sizes in more locations around the country?
Our outline plan has options relating to such unknown elements, but we cannot firm up those options until we have detail on the exact properties of each of the vaccines that come through successfully.
My final point about delivery is that our boards are doing two things. They are using some of the existing flu infrastructure, in the larger walk-through and drive-through flu vaccination centres. Those are more appropriate for urban areas and for certain cohorts of our population.
We will also use mobile vaccination units. We will use more local high street vaccination centres, which is where our partnerships with local authorities will come into their own. We will make sure that the vaccination programme is accessible to people the length and breadth of Scotland, taking account of the geography and circumstances in which people do not have private transport or their age means that they have mobility issues.
The final point that I want to make is that, depending on the vaccine’s properties, we will look to use the health service resource to vaccinate some people at home because it will be easier for them to receive the vaccine in those circumstances.