At least two million jabs a week to fulfil government target

In order to fulfil the government’s plan to vaccinate everyone in the four highest-priority groups by mid-February, the NHS will have to start delivering at least two million jabs a week from next week.

Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccines minister, said that the four groups that the Prime Minister said will have a first dose amount to 13.9 million people in England, although this is dependent upon a sharp increase in the rate of vaccination. The four groups are everyone aged over 70, plus close to 3 million health and social care workers, the clinically extremely vulnerable and around 400,000 care home residents.

The bulk of the burden is expected to fall to GPs who have warned that staffing could limit their ability to ratchet up delivery.

Approximately a million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine have been administered in the last month and Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said 530,000 doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab were now available to the NHS. Sir John Bell, the regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, has said a further 450,000 doses are due this week.

After those doses, 11.9 million more jabs are to be delivered in the following five to six weeks, depending on how the government defines mid-February. That implies an average speed of between two million and 2.4 million doses per week.