Robert Peston Robert Peston

We need to cut vaccine red tape

A vial of the Oxford vaccine (photo: Getty)

As I mentioned on Monday, in a fortnight AstraZeneca will be putting 2 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine into vials every week.

At that point the limiting factor on how many people can be vaccinated will switch from manufacturing to distribution – and in particular how long it takes to ‘process’ each person who turns up to be vaccinated.

It allegedly takes three times longer in the UK than in Israel to do the on-site paperwork for each vaccinated person. Which, if true, means the UK would be processing a smaller number of people than it could be vaccinating every day.

And in the current raging epidemic that would not just be an academic underperformance, but would have a big and huge cost in lives.

This excess of bureaucracy in the UK feels real to me, in that when I took my 90-year-old mum to be vaccinated before Christmas, I was asked for her medical history, allergies and vulnerabilities in a 15-minute phone interview before we went, and that was repeated in a 15-minute interview with a nurse when we got to the hospital.

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