GPs are being forced to THROW AWAY leftover vaccines

GPs are being forced to throw away leftover vaccines rather than give patients second doses or use them on staff, medics have revealed.

Local NHS leaders are said to have issued the instructions to doctors organising clinics, despite Professor Chris Whitty saying yesterday the UK’s roll-out of vaccinations was being held back by delayed deliveries of the Pfizer jab.

Some surgeries are taking a stand against the orders, described as ‘bordering on criminal’, but others fear their supplies will be cancelled if they don’t comply. 

Supply chain uncertainty – particularly around the Pfizer jab which needs to be kept at -70C – means GPs are struggling to book the exact number of appointments for clinics and in some cases patients haven’t turned up having been given little time to prepare.

The NHS said there was ‘no reason’ why stocks should be wasted, insisting vaccination sites should make sure a back-up list of patients and staff who can get the jab at short-notice if there are such absences is drawn up. 

Dr Robert Morley, the director of professional support at the Birmingham Local Medical Committee told the Telegraph: ‘This is ridiculous, bordering on the criminal, to actually be wasting vaccines when you have the worst global healthcare crisis for a century.

‘The logical thing to do would be to use [the leftovers] as a second dose for healthcare workers, for example, who may be there in the building.’ 

The British Medical Association described the reports as ‘extremely concerning, absolutely unacceptable and morally wrong’, warning any wasted dose denies someone the chance to be protected from the virus, and, perhaps ultimately, death.

In other coronavirus news:

• PM suspends ALL travel corridors from 4am Monday and everyone needs negative Covid test for entry;
• Even Whitty and Vallance sound half-way cheery as Boris says mass compliance with third lockdown has brought COVID outbreak under control;
• Chancellor WON’T bring in a one-off levy to cover the £280billion spent fighting coronavirus;
• More than 300,000 Covid jabs are delivered in one day as Government announces nearly one in 20 Britons have now had a vaccine  

It comes as vaccine manufacturer Pfizer is shrinking and delaying its deliveries to Europe while it expands its factory in Belgium.

The company makes one of just two vaccines that are being given to the public in the UK and confirmed that Britain would be affected in late January and February.

Concerns about vaccine deliveries in the UK swelled this week as the Government repeatedly refused to reveal how many are available and how many more are coming next week.

Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, today said that the amount of vaccines available was the ‘limiting’ factor of how fast the country’s roll-out could go.

Britain is already leading the continent with 3.3million people vaccinated – one in 20 – and a million immunised in just five days, but officials insist the programme could go even faster if there were enough supplies to keep it running.

Countries in the EU have criticised Pfizer for shrinking its deliveries as it emerged Norway would get a batch 18 per cent smaller than expected next week.

The UK is already stretching Pfizer’s jabs – which have to be kept in specialist freezers at below 70°C – as far as they will go, stretching the gap between doses from three to 12 or more weeks and using thinner needles to reduce wastage and squeeze more doses out of the vials.

Pfizer is based in the US and developed the vaccine with German firm BioNTech. They manufacture Europe’s supplies at a facility in Belgium.

The German health ministry revealed today that its supplies were being delayed.

The ministry said: ‘At short notice, the EU Commission and, via it, the EU member states, were informed that Pfizer will not be able to fully meet the already promised delivery volume for the next three to four weeks due to modifications at the plant.’

Pfizer expects to have finished the work on its Belgian factory by mid-February, reported news website ENCA.

Germany, Norway, Spain, Denmark, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Sweden were among the countries expecting deliveries.

In a letter to the European Commission, leaders from some of those countries described the delay as ‘unacceptable’, the Financial Times reported.

‘Not only does it impact the planned vaccination schedules,’ they wrote. ‘It also decreases the credibility of the vaccination process’. 

Britain has now officially left the EU so it is not involved in the European Commission complaint, but the company told the FT Britain’s supply would also be affected.

They said: ‘Although this will temporarily impact shipments in late January to early February, it will provide a significant increase in doses available for patients in late February and March.’ 

A Pfizer Denmark spokesperson told the Associated Press: ‘This temporary reduction will affect all European countries’. 

Boris Johnson and his vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi this week repeatedly refused to be drawn on putting numbers on Britain’s deliveries, claiming it was a matter of national security because ‘the whole world is looking to acquire vaccines at the moment’

The UK has ordered 40million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine, alongside 100million of one made by Oxford University and AstraZeneca – those are the only two approved.

Although Britain’s vaccination programme is hurtling forward and now immunising more than 250,000 people per day, pressure is growing on the Government to hurry it up even more.

The NHS looks on target to hit the 13.9million most vulnerable people by mid-February, but lockdown rules will likely have to remain until significantly more people – potentially everyone over the age of 50, around half the population – has been reached.

Officials say the ‘rate-limiting factor’ of the vaccine roll-out is not how quickly the NHS can use up the supplies but how quickly they’re coming in.

Professor Chris Whitty said in a Downing Street press conference today: ‘The thing which is limiting us at the moment is not the capacity of the NHS to deliver, it is the vaccines delivered.

‘That is true across Europe, that is true across the world, and it’s something which all of us need to do is to make sure we use the vaccines we’ve got as efficiently as possible.’

 

Rishi Sunak rejects wealth tax: Chancellor WON’T bring in a one-off levy to cover the £280billion spent fighting coronavirus

Rishi Sunak has rejected a proposal for an emergency wealth tax to recover the staggering £280billion the Government has spent so far on the coronavirus pandemic.

The Chancellor was presented with plans for a one-off levy on those with assets of more than £500,000, or £1million for a couple, including their family home and pension.

But Mr Sunak has told allies that he has ruled out the suggestion because he believes it would be ‘un-Conservative’ and go against the party’s aspirational values. However, he is still considering proposals to raise tens of billions from the better-off by sharply hiking capital gains tax.

The Wealth Tax Commission last month proposed a 5 per cent levy on housing, pension, business, equity and savings wealth that it forecast would raise £260billion. 

The tax would apply to every UK resident with assets of £500,000 or more and would include homes excluding mortgage debt.

About one in six adults – 8.2million people – would be liable, but the tax would largely fall on older generations who have paid off more of their mortgages and built up larger pension pots.  

Almost 40 per would be aged over 65, while just 6 per cent would be between 35 and 44 years old. The Commission recommended households pay the levy at a rate of 1 per cent a year for five years.

It estimated up to 10 per cent of those affected would be ‘asset-rich, cash poor’ and not have the ready money to pay for it. For those people, it suggested smaller payments for a longer period.

Lord O’Donnell, a former head of the Civil Service, said in the report’s introduction: ‘It is broadly accepted that if the Prime Minister is to stand by his promise not to return to austerity then taxes will eventually have to rise. 

‘This will mean breaking another manifesto commitment. Or it means thinking seriously about new taxes.’ 

It comes as  Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance sounded a tone of optimism amid signs the UK’s Covid resurgence is finally coming under control and as one in 20 people in Britain have been vaccinated.

Speaking in a Downing Street briefing, chief medical officer Professor Whitty said coronavirus infections were ‘levelling off’ thanks to the ‘enormous efforts’ of Britons following lockdown rules since they began this month.

He said hospital admissions and death counts would continue to rise into next week at least, because of how long it takes people to fall seriously ill or die, but that data suggests even the new super-infectious variant is coming under control.

A total of 3,234,946 people across the UK have now had the first dose of a Covid vaccine and the number of positive tests announced – 55,761 – was 18 per cent lower than last Friday. Daily deaths were also down slightly on last week, at 1,280. 

Speaking about lockdown working even on the fast-spreading variant that emerged in Kent and now accounts for a majority of all cases in the UK, Professor Whitty said: ‘We were not sure this was going to be possible with this new variant, but this demonstrates with the actions everyone has taken we are now slowing this right down and we are hoping that in due course it will start to drop.’  

Lord O’Donnell argued that governments have made ‘radical changes to taxes when there has been public understanding that change is needed’. 

Public sector debt is now £2trillion-plus, more than the value of the whole economy, and from April to November the Government borrowed £284.7billion to cover the gap between spending and revenue.

This is three times the previous high since comparable records began in 1984.

Other ideas thought to be under consideration by Mr Sunak, who will present the next Budget in March, include raising capital gains tax (CGT).

CGT is charged on the profits made from selling investments not held in a tax-free account such as an ISA.

Entrepreneurs often pay it when they sell a stake in their business to expand it, or pass it on to new owners. 

It is charged on profits of more than £12,300 at ten per cent or 20 per cent depending on the seller’s overall income.

The Office for Tax Simplification has suggested cutting the tax-free sum and aligning CGT rates with income tax bands of 20, 40 and 45 per cent.

The Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank estimates that this could raise an extra £90billion over five years.

But entrepreneurs have argued that the UK could lose much more in the long term as businessmen take their ideas overseas.

There have also been calls for the stamp duty holiday to be extended beyond its deadline of March 31.

But a Treasury source said: ‘The Chancellor announced this as a time-limited stimulus. There is no point in doing something time-limited if you extend it.’ 

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson praised the public’s efforts at following lockdown rules and appealed for people not to weaken, saying they must ‘think twice’ before leaving the house. ‘This is not the time for the slightest relaxation of our national resolve and our individual efforts,’ he said. ‘So please stay at home, please protect the NHS and save lives.’

Professor Whitty said that the NHS is still under ‘extraordinary’ pressure but he believed the peak of infections had already happened in much of the country and hospitalisations could top out in the next week to 10 days in most places.

‘The peak of deaths, I fear, is in the future,’ he said. ‘The peak of hospitalisations in some parts of the country may be around about now and beginning to come off the very, very top.’

‘Because people are sticking so well to the guidelines we do think the peaks are coming over the next week to 10 days for most places in terms of new people into hospital.’

Sir Patrick also sounded a positive note about the direction of travel, but added that the measures in place were the only thing holding the disease back: ‘Take the lid off now this is going to boil over for sure.’ 

The big policy announcement for the PM’s appearance was that, from Monday, all arrivals to the UK from abroad will have to test negative and isolate for 10 days when they get here, regardless of where they come from. 

Amid fears over new mutant strains coming into the country, triggered by the discovery of a worrying variant from Brazil in travellers in Japan, he said that from 4am Monday all travel corridors will be suspended and anyone coming to the UK must have proof of a negative test in the previous 72 hours.

Even then people must still isolate for 10 days – or five if they have another negative result during that period.

The new regime will be backed by tougher spot checks and stay in place until at least February 15 as ministers and scientists work out how to manage the threat posed by mutations. It was revealed that 11 people in Britain have been diagnosed with one of the variants that have sprung up in Brazil, although it is thought to be the milder of the two and it’s not clear how much of a threat it poses.   

The Prime Minister is facing demands to take advantage of the space created by the tough restrictions to push ahead on vaccinations as figures showed the number of jabs being administered rocketing to 320,000 a day. Almost 3.7million doses have been given out. 

Giving cautious reasons to be hopeful, Professor Whitty said it appeared that infections were ‘levelling off’ in some parts of the country, particularly those that were in Tier 4 lockdowns before Christmas – namely London, the South East and the East of England.

But he said the number of people testing positive for the disease is ‘still extremely high’.

He said it is ‘very likely’ that the situation will improve by the spring but cautioned that life would not go back to how it was before the pandemic.

‘What no-one thinks is that suddenly in spring it is all over and that is the whole thing done. What we expect is things to be substantially better than they are at the moment,’ Professor Whitty said.

‘The hope is that is a kind of reasonable timeframe to be thinking about. But if we try to put a hard stop on this we will be caught out by events.

‘But I think that broad time-frame still feels to me a reasonable one, provided what we are not expecting is completely back to two springs ago.’

Hopes the peak of the second wave has finally passed have grown after a raft of official data and scientific estimates offered the strongest evidence yet that restrictions are tackling the mutant strain.

SAGE said that the R number is between 1.2 and 1.3 – down from 1.4 last week – and the growth rate was between 2 per cent and 5 per cent a day. However, the group stressed that the data represent the average situation over the past few weeks, rather than the present state of play, with daily cases steadily falling. 

Cambridge University researchers have said they believe R is below 1 in the East of England, London, the South East, West Midlands and Yorkshire and the Humber. 

Public Health England revealed yesterday that weekly Covid cases fell in every age group except the over-80s, while Department of Health figures showed dozens of boroughs saw a drop in infection rates.

Mr Johnson has shelved the idea of toughening lockdown for now, after days of swirling rumours that non-essential click and collect and exercising with a friend could be banned in England. 

But despite the optimism over the vaccine rollout there are still huge challenges, with new figures showing the economy is on track for a double-dip recession. GDP was down 2.6 per cent during the looser national lockdown in November. 

Tory MPs in London and mayor Sadiq Khan are also angry that the capital seems to be lagging behind in the vaccine drive. 

It also emerged that a Brazilian coronavirus variant that experts fear could make vaccines less effective may have first emerged in Britain in November. Labour accused No10 of ‘putting lives at risk’ by being too slow to close the borders.   

The NHS is expected to remain under huge strain for months to come, as the trend in hospital admissions and deaths lags weeks behind cases. 

And Mr Johnson is still facing calls from experts to tighten the controls. 

Shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth said last night that he believes the mid-February target for vaccinations will be met and should be raised.

‘Everyone I’ve spoken to who understands what’s happening with vaccination seems to think they will meet this target,’ he told BBC Question Time.

‘So I think they will meet that target, but they need to go further and faster. Because if we were able to vaccinate just under 30 million people, we would reduce hospitalisations and deaths by 99 per cent, and we should be targeting that now.’ 

Modelling by Cambridge scientists — whose warnings of 4,000 deaths a day spooked No10 into imposing England’s second lockdown — bolstered claims that the original restrictions were working. 

The team said cases began to drop on December 21 and that the ban on Christmas mixing in the worst-hit areas worked to cut the spread. 

The experts – who believe deaths will peak ‘over the coming days’ – also put the UK’s R-number at now less than one, despite the latest official Government estimate issued last week claiming it was between one and 1.4.

The powerful Covid O Cabinet committee met yesterday to consider the state of play, including signing off a travel ban from South America due to fears over an emerging super-strain in Brazil. However, it did not ramp up the lockdown in England.

Ministers are instead focusing on improving compliance, with an ad campaign delivering alarming messages such as: ‘Don’t let a coffee cost lives.’

Professor Andrew Hayward, director of the University College London (UCL) Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said last week’s data on cases ‘probably relates to the lockdown measures’.

But he told Times Radio: ‘My concern is that what we’ve really got going on here is we’ve more or less split the population in two – those who can afford to stay at home and work and those who can’t.

‘I suspect what we’re really seeing is a very fast decline in those who are staying at home, and either a levelling off or potentially even a continuing increase in those who are continuing to work.’

He said the national picture was also being impacted by the two different strains of the virus.

He added that ‘what concerns me’ is there is more activity than in the first lockdown, with three times as many people now using the London Underground and twice as many people using cars and buses.

Asked if further lockdown measures were necessary, he said: ‘I do’, adding it needed to be possible for ‘those people who can’t afford to work from home to work from home with the right financial packages to support that’.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter of the Statistical Laboratory at Cambridge University has said coronavirus deaths are likely to peak in the next week to 10 days.

Sir David said the lockdown measures were having an impact, with the peak in infections having passed ‘a good few days ago’ which would lead to a reduction in the numbers dying from the disease.

‘They are likely to level off in a week – 10 days maybe – at a peak which is probably going to be bigger than the first wave peak of 1,000-a-day, but then should decline due the reductions in cases that we are seeing and, of course, the vaccine programme,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s The World At One.

He warned, however, that hospital admissions would fall more slowly.

While the Government’s plan to vaccinate all over-70s and the clinically extremely vulnerable by mid-February covered around 90 per cent of those dying from the disease, he said only 55 per cent of those being admitted to hospital and 25 per cent of those in intensive care were over 70.

‘We are going to see the reduction in hospitalisations and in particular in intensive care is going to be a lot slower,’ Sir David said.

In accordance Mr Johnson’s new travel rules travellers from South America, Portugal, some of central America and South Africa are already barred from coming to the country. 

Mr Johnson said: ‘It’s precisely because we have the hope of that vaccine and the risk of new strains coming from overseas that we must take additional steps now to stop those strains from entering the country.   

Earlier, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps defended the timing of the South America border ban amid complaints ministers have been ‘behind the curve’ responding to the threat of new Covid variants.

The ban, also covers the Central American state of Panama and Portugal – due to its strong travel links with Brazil – and the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde.

It applies to everyone who has been in the area over the past 10 days – although UK and Irish nationals are exempt – and came into force at 4am.

Scientists analysing the Brazilian variant believe the mutations it shares with the new South African strain are associated with a rapid increase in cases in locations where there have already been large outbreaks of the disease.

British and Irish nationals and others with residence rights are exempted from the measures that were backed by the Scottish and Welsh governments, though they must self-isolate for 10 days along with their households on their return.

Mr Shapps described the ban as a ‘precautionary’ measure to ensure the vaccination programme rolling out across the UK was not disrupted by new variants of the virus.

Asked if the Brazilian strain was currently in the country, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘Not as far as we are aware, I think, at this stage.

‘There haven’t been any flights that I can see from the last week from Brazil, for example.’

Dr Mike Tildesley, an epidemiologist who advises the Government on its scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling group, said the UK was late in imposing the travel ban but that it should minimise the risk from the ‘more transmissible’ variant.

‘We always have this issue with travel bans of course, that we’re always a little bit behind the curve,’ he told BBC Breakfast.

Tories voiced concerns about the vaccination drive in London, after Mr Khan yesterday complained about a lack of supplies. 

Only two per cent of people in the capital were vaccinated against coronavirus by January 10, compared to five per cent in the North East and Yorkshire. Fewer than 30 per cent of London’s over-80s have had the one dose of the vaccine — compared to the highest figure of 43.8 per cent in the North East and Yorkshire.

The first regional breakdown showed the Midlands had vaccinated the most people against the disease, managing to get first doses to 387,647 in the first month of the roll-out. This was more than double the 186,291 in the East of England and almost twice as many as London’s 199,986.

London has accounted for only 10 per cent of the country’s vaccinations so far despite being home to 16 per cent of the population with some nine million people. The capital and the East are the only regions where the share of vaccines has been smaller than the share of the population. 

NHS leaders in the capital insist that London ‘is getting its fair share of vaccine supply’ and added: ‘We have more than 100 vaccination sites up and running across London, including the NHS Covid-19 vaccination centre in the ExCeL London, and more are opening all the time.’

But Tory MP for Wimbledon Stephen Hammond told MailOnline he was ‘concerned’ about the low vaccination rates – and said the capital needed to be ‘prioritised’ because people lived more closely together. 

‘I want to make sure London is not left behind. I think they mayor has been rather slow on this,’ the former health minister said.

‘We need to make sure that London is getting the same share of vaccine as the rest of the country, and probably needs slightly higher priority because of the more dense living in London and that’s where some of the more vulnerable rates have been in the second outbreak.’ 

Other senior Conservatives said they were seeking urgent clarification from ministers on why the numbers were ‘very low’.  

Leaked Government targets show that officials are planning to double the number of people protected against Covid next week alone, aiming to hit 500,000 jabs per day and add 3.6million people to the current total 2.6m. Data yesterday suggested that 223,726 jabs were done on Monday, showing the programme is expanding fast.