A 24 hour vaccination roll out will be piloted in London by the end of the month, vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi has announced.
He said the scheme could be expanded after it is trialled in hospitals in the capital and said the scheme would ‘absolutely’ have begun before February.
Mr Zahawi told Sky News: ‘We are going to pilot the 24-hour vaccination, the NHS is going to pilot that in hospitals in London and we will look at how we expand that.’
But he said 8am-8pm vaccination ‘works much more conveniently for those who are over 80 and then as you move down the age groups it becomes much more convenient for people to go late at night and in the early hours’.
He backed the target to offer a first jab to everyone by September as ‘achievable’ and said that over-70s are currently being offered first jabs in areas only where ‘the majority’ of over-80s have had their first shot.
It comes after the Government announced that the UK would now move ahead with offering the over-70s Covid jabs from this week.
More than 3.8 million people have now been given their first doses and over half of the over-80s have had a jab.
But Mr Zahawi warned that vaccine supply ‘remains challenging’ and said it is the limiting factor in the rollout of coronavirus jabs.
He told BBC Breakfast: ‘We now have built a deployment infrastructure that can deploy as much vaccine as it comes through.
‘And so it’s the vaccine supply – which remains lumpy, it remains challenging, you may have read over the weekend probably some of the challenges around Pfizer and of course Oxford/AstraZeneca – but I’m confident we can meet our target mid-Feb, (for) those top four cohorts.’
An average of 140 jabs are being administered every minute, NHS Chief Executive Sir Simon Stevens said yesterday, when he revealed one Covid patient was being admitted to hospital every 30 seconds.
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