Meeting of the Parliament 19 November 2020
With regard to information, we will—as I said in my statement—write to those in the first cohort over the coming weeks to ensure that they know what the arrangements will be for them. We will write to those individuals either directly or, in the case of health and social care staff, through their employer.
Thereafter, we currently have in train the planning for, and content of, a national door drop that will provide every household in Scotland with detailed information on the vaccines, their safety, how we are going to deliver them, what to expect and so on.
In addition, I will write to every member of the Parliament with the same level of detail that I gave on the flu vaccine programme so that they know about both the national and local arrangements and have a named local contact to whom they can go to directly as an MSP with individual constituent inquiries. Of course, members can always come to me with such inquiries too.
On local access, we are putting in place every possible step that we can so as to minimise any travel that anyone has to undertake in order to be vaccinated. In some instances, that may not be possible in a particular village, for example—and I am thinking of my own constituency here. It may be really difficult for people to travel to the village next door or the nearest town. We are therefore deploying that huge clinical workforce so that, in some cases, we can deliver the vaccine directly to someone in their own home. As I have said many times, however, that is dependent on the properties of the vaccine and on how stable it is the more it is transported.