Vaccination effort
I continue to lead a vaccination team in Trowbridge and Salisbury. It’s great to be part of a monumental national undertaking.
We entered lockdown roughly 13 months ago. Casting our minds back, it’s possible to recall just how far off the sunlit uplands of relative normality were.
A year ago, Oxford University commenced vaccine trials. Scientists were saying the jab had a good chance of success but generally they take many years to be arm-ready. The all-important Phase III trials came later in the year, and in November a 70% efficacy figure was published, since exceeded in real life studies, with our UK regulator, the MHRA, approving the vaccine the following month. On the 4th January, the race to vaccinate the country began.
In over three and half months over half the UK population have had at least one dose of the vaccine.
Many, notably the Labour leader, claimed government was ‘over-promising. and ‘under-delivering’.
Well, the official Covid tracker records average daily doses at between 350,000-400,000 from between mid-January to date, smashing through targets as we offer a vaccine to everyone in the top 9 priority groups, ahead of the 15 of April deadline.
In the early days, I asked for more granularity on numbers of vaccines and a better picture of what constituted an exit strategy. I also called for a conversation on the number of annual covid deaths considered acceptable before closing life down again, citing the toll from seasonal flu as a reasonable benchmark
On vaccine granularity, I called for a distinction between jabs offered and jabs given. In the summer, we were expecting a take up of about 60% - as with flu. But take up has exceeded 90% in some age groups which has massively aided the roll out and our exit strategy – the road map delivered a month after I made my comments as I cautiously voted for lockdown.
I welcome assurances from prominent figures like Prof Whitty that lockdowns will not be needed again as we begin to live with Covid as we do flu. In an average year, we experience 7-9,000 deaths from influenza; in bad years up to 28,000, Incidentally, more than 72,000 die prematurely from smoking which we appear to accept since we don’t ban cigarettes, an intervention that would be far less intrusive than the measures put in place during the current crisis,