Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 13 January 2021
I do not believe that timetables are slipping. What I have set out in my statement concurs exactly with what we have said before. We started with the people who the JCVI’s advice said were most clinically vulnerable—that is, our elderly residents in care homes. Inevitably, vaccinating older people in that setting takes longer than it will take a mass vaccination centre to vaccinate 50 or 60-year-olds, or even people as old as me. We have done what the JCVI says. We are on track to complete vaccination of all those in priority groups 1 and 2—all NHS staff and front-line social care staff, as well as all people aged 80 and over who live in the community and care home residents and staff—by the end of this month. In my book, that is not a slipping timetable at all.
On the delay to the national booking system, I believe that the email that Donald Cameron referred to was issued by the local health and social care partnership and that it has now corrected it, because the information that it gave was entirely wrong. The national booking system is not delayed. It will be ready. It is being tested towards the end of this week and at the beginning of next to make sure that it is absolutely ready and capable of taking the volume of work that it needs to take. It will be ready from the end of January or beginning of February to do its job.
The system’s job will be the high-volume throughput of people in the younger age groups to make sure that we can get them booked into the site that is most convenient for them. For some, that will be their local vaccination clinic; for others, the mobile vaccination units will be most appropriate; and, for yet others, it will be either the mini vaccination sites or the mass vaccination sites. People will be able to change their booking if the time and date that is given to them is not convenient.
All of that is on track and by the end of February into early March we will have completed first-dose vaccination of JCVI priority groups 1 to 5 and will begin second-dose vaccination, which will run in parallel.