Former prime minister Tony Blair said the UK needs to dramatically accelerate its coronavirus vaccination programme in order to lift lockdown rules in the spring.
Claiming ‘it’s not complicated’ on live TV this morning as he launched a ‘blueprint’ for improving the country’s vaccine roll-out, Mr Blair suggested restrictions could ease ‘significantly’ in February if the NHS scales up to millions of jabs every week.
As supplies flow into the country in the coming weeks, Mr Blair said, officials should strain every sinew to make sure every dose is used as soon as possible.
He said there should be pop-up vaccination centres and mobile ones, that pharmacies should be used, and volunteers recruited en masse.
Polling stations, pubs and offices should be used as hubs and supplies could provide as many as three million doses per week by the end of February, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change said in a report.
By the end of February, the institute claims, half the population could have received the first dose of a vaccine to protect them from Covid-19.
Mr Blair has become involved in the vaccine policy after he was the first to publicly suggest restricting jabs to one dose to begin with and stretching them further, avoiding holding back supplies to ensure people get a second one. This has since become the official policy of the Government’s roll-out.
Tony Blair claimed all adults in the UK could have had the first dose of a Covid vaccine by the end of March if new jabs go to plan and can be rolled out as quickly as they’re manufactured
In his institute’s report Mr Blair said the UK should be preparing for the possibility that it could have a supply of five million vaccine doses per week by the end of March and it should be able to give them all out as quickly as they’re delivered.
He said that, by the week after next, AstraZeneca should be able to supply two million vaccines a week, rising to as many as three million per week in February.
Millions of doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab are already in the country and more are coming.
And he said it was possible Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine could be approved in February or March and then supply millions per week to the UK in March.
Moderna is also expected to deliver millions of doses in the spring.
He said based on these figures, the Government could be looking at three million doses a week by the end of January, four million a week by the end of February and five million a week by the end of March.
‘This would allow us to ease restrictions significantly in February and have a majority of the population vaccinated by the end of the third week of March,’ Mr Blair said.
Speaking on Good Morning Britain, the former Labour leader said the UK must ‘use every single available bit of capacity in order to make sure these vaccines are used’.
This would involve using community pharmacies as vaccinators alongside retired people and occupational health workers, and using pop-up and mobile vaccination clinics.
‘We need to be ramping all of this up, and we just need to go on to a completely different footing with it,’ he said.
‘There’s really no reason why you need a very complicated system to do it. I get a flu jab every year and I get it at my local pharmacy, it’s not complicated.’
Earlier, vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said 99 per cent of deaths could be stopped by vaccinating the top nine priority groups laid down by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).
When asked how long it would take to give jabs to those groups, Mr Zahawi said: ‘I’m very hopeful that by the spring we will get through the nine categories.’
On Tuesday evening, Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggested that regulatory approval of batches of the new Oxford vaccine was a bottleneck stopping more jabs being released to hospitals and GP surgeries.
He said a ‘rate-limiting’ factor was the approval process and this would now be ‘ratcheted up’.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said it was working quickly while not compromising safety.
An MHRA spokesman said: ‘We are working closely with the manufacturer, AstraZeneca, to ensure that batches of the vaccine are released as quickly as possible.
‘Biological medicines such as vaccines are very complex in nature and independent testing, as done by the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, is vital to ensure quality and safety.
‘NIBSC has scaled up its capacity to ensure that multiple batches can be tested simultaneously, and that this can be done as quickly as possible, without compromising quality and safety.’
At the same time as the NIBSC tests batches, vaccine manufacturers conduct their own quality tests.
Manufacturers then send evidence to the NIBSC in the form of a document called a batch-specific lot release protocol.
Meanwhile, the Government has denied reports that a shortage of glass vials for the vaccine is causing any delays.
A spokeswoman for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said: ‘There is no shortage of vials for the UK. We have been monitoring the requirements across the supply chain from supplier through to patient for some time.
‘There are clear supply chain plans in place for both the supply and onward deployment of all vaccine candidates.
‘This includes materials, manufacturing, transport, storage and distribution.’
AstraZeneca and Pfizer have also both reportedly dismissed suggestions they cannot supply the vaccine fast enough.
Oxford Biomedica, the main manufacturer of the ‘raw’ vaccine in the UK for the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, has said it is running at full production.