When we interviewed Matt Hancock this week, he was clear that the government isn’t going for herd immunity through vaccination. Instead, the government is seeking to use the vaccine to protect the vulnerable and break the link between cases, hospitalisations and deaths. Once that is done, the government will start to ease restrictions. Crucially, he was also clear that the government now regards the first shot as the most important metric when counting vaccinations.
In his Monday night address, Boris Johnson said that if the government could succeed in giving a first shot to the first four groups in the vaccination programme by mid-February then the government would start ‘cautiously, to move regions down the tiers.’
If the government is to hit this target it will have to be vaccinating around two million people a week. If it can keep that pace up (and it should be able to given the amount of the Oxford vaccine it has pre-ordered), then the 28 million people who make up the phase one vaccination list – which, as Jonathan Van-Tam has said, account for 99 per cent of deaths and hospitalisations – should have received their first shot by the end of the first week in April.
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