The Prime Minister has today confirmed that 24-hour rollout of the vaccine will commence “as soon as we can”. Recently opened mass vaccination centres have taken the burden off hospitals and allowed more appointments to take place each day.
The Government has opened mass vaccine centres in the following locations:
Bristol: Ashton Gate
Surrey: Epsom racecourse
London: ExCel centre
Newcastle: Centre for Life
Manchester: Manchester Tennis and Football Centre
Stevenage: Robertson House
Birmingham: Millennium point
The centres can allegedly vaccinate up to four people per minute.
Together, the seven new centres bring the number of locations providing vaccinations in the UK to 1,200.
The Health Secretary has promised the number of vaccines given per day will accelerate.
He said: “Every adult will be offered a vaccine by the autumn, absolutely. I totally agree it’s very, very important.
It comes as the manufacturer of the Oxford vaccine AstraZeneca said it is “imminently” scaling up to being able to release two million doses of the vaccine per week.
Tom Keith-Roach, president of AstraZeneca UK, said 1.1 million doses of the jab had been released to the UK to date, but the aim was to reach two million doses per week around the middle of next month.
He told the Commons Science and Technology Committee: “We are scaling up very rapidly – and this will happen imminently – to releasing two million doses a week.
“We’re absolutely on track to do that and therefore deliver tens of millions of doses in the first quarter of the year.
“If we average two million a week through the course of the year, that gets us to the 100 million doses that we’re committed to the UK through the course of 2021.”
Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said: “In any manufacturing process, especially one where you’re dealing with a biological compound, a novel vaccine is lumpy at the outset,” he told the Commons Science and Technology Committee.
“There’s no doubt that it was, but getting better. It begins to stabilise and you get much clearer line of sight.
“I now have line of sight of deliveries all the way through until end of February and getting more confidence about March as well.
“We have millions of doses coming through in the weeks and then next month and the month after.”
