If you haven’t yet been approached about having a Covid booster jab, your phone is about the spring into life – and it is unlikely to let you forget it until you agreed to have your third dose of the vaccine. The Prime Minister’s announcement on Sunday evening that every adult is to be offered a jab by the end of December, as opposed to the end of January as previously planned, will mean averaging a million jabs a day – even more than the peak of the inoculation programme in the spring.
But there is a price to pay, and health secretary Sajid Javid admitted as much on this morning’s Today programme. ‘For the next couple of weeks,’ he said, ‘our GPs will only be focussing on urgent needs and vaccination, and it means non-urgent appointments and elective surgeries may have to be postponed into the New Year.’
Is this wise, when the NHS is already suffering a huge backlog in treatments?
Is this wise, when the NHS is already suffering a huge backlog in treatments? Even more to the point, could the policy of making it even harder to see a GP eventually kill more people than might be saved by accelerating the booster vaccine programme?
Javid did at least say that people with cancer symptoms should still make appointments with their GPs.
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