corona virus vaccination

Taxi and food discounts offer to boost youth jabs

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It is fascinating how imaginative people can be when the public policy opportunity demands it. I am not sure these incentives will have the same level of impact for rural dwellers many of whom start from a position of limited access to these services. This story tells us:

Young people will be offered discounted takeaways and taxi rides to get their Covid jabs in a bid to boost vaccine uptake, the government has said.

Food delivery and taxi-hailing firms including Uber, Bolt, Deliveroo and Pizza Pilgrims will offer incentives to people to get vaccinated.

The Department of Health said details on more partnerships would be released “in due course”.

It said about 67% of 18 to 29-year-olds in England have had a first jab.

More than 72% of UK adults have had two doses so far, while 88.5% have had one.

Ride hailing firm Uber will send reminders to all users in August urging them to get vaccinated – and will offer discounted rides and meals on its Uber Eats platform for young people who have the vaccine.

Bolt, another taxi app firm, will offer “free ride credit” to vaccination centres, while food delivery firm Deliveroo will give vouchers to young people who get vaccinated.

The Department of Health said other incentives could include “vouchers or discount codes for people attending pop-up vaccine sites and booking through the NHS, social media competitions and promotional offers for restaurants”.

Covid: Indian variant could disrupt 21 June easing, PM says

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I think there is no doubt that rural places will be adversely affected if we can’t push on with the re-opening of the country. However it also seems to me that we are on a knife edge here. This story tells us:

The Indian virus variant could pose “serious disruption” to lockdown easing in England on 21 June, the PM says.

Boris Johnson said if it was found to be “significantly” more transmissible there could be “some hard choices”.

The wait between jabs will be cut from 12 weeks to eight for the over-50s and clinically vulnerable because of concern over the variant, he added.

Cases of the Indian coronavirus variant have nearly tripled in the past week, Public Health England figures show.

Surge testing is already taking place in 15 areas across England, including Bolton, Blackburn, London, Sefton and Nottingham.

According to Friday’s government figures, a further 17 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive test and another 2,193 coronavirus cases have been recorded.

Speaking at a Downing Street briefing alongside the UK’s chief medical adviser, Prof Chris Whitty, Mr Johnson said first Covid vaccine doses will also be prioritised “for anyone eligible who has not yet come forward”. Currently, England’s vaccination rollout is open to people over the age of 38.

The prime minister said he did not believe that the “present evidence” showed a need to delay the next stage in the easing of lockdown in England on Monday – when pubs and restaurants will be allowed to serve customers indoors and six people or two households can meet in a private home.

UK to begin using Oxford Covid vaccine as PM strikes hopeful tone

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This is a thrilling development. My sources tell me we are likely to be less thrilled about how the challenges of rolling the vaccine out will be addressed. I have some modest recent personal experiences of the challenges on this score. Lets hope everything clicks into place!!!

People in the UK will begin receiving the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine on Monday, after the prime minister expressed hope that the pace could be ramped up to protect tens of millions of people from Covid-19 within the next few months.

In England the first doses would be administered in a small number of hospitals for surveillance purposes, said the NHS: in Oxford, where the vaccine was invented, London, Sussex, Lancashire and Warwickshire.

Once it is certain there are no hitches, the jab will be shipped within days to GP-led centres in the community. There are 730 vaccination centres at the moment, with a further 180 and 100 more hospital sites scheduled to open this week.

The first priority is to immunise care home residents. Although the UK government’s advisory Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) recognised this group as the most vulnerable to Covid, the need to store the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine at -70C in the long term has meant supplies have not been taken into most care homes. GPs are now being offered £10 for every care home resident they vaccinate by the end of January.

Boris Johnson said he could not yet say how fast the vaccination programme would be scaled up to the 2 million jabs a week he hoped for.

“I wish I could give you here and now any sort of elaboration on the figures you have already heard about how we hope to get up to 2 million a week and so on,” he told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday. “I can’t give you that yet. What I can tell you is that … we do hope that we will be able to do tens of millions in the course of the next three months.”

US, Germany and UK could start Covid vaccinations as early as December

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To me we’re rapidly entering the careful what you wish for element of this major challenge – rolling out the vaccine(s) and getting everyone to have one of them will be the big new challenges particularly for rural dwellers.

As G20 leaders pledged to ensure the equitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, drugs and tests so that poorer countries are not left out, the US, UK and Germany each announced plans to begin vaccinations in their countries in December, while Spain said it would start administering the vaccine to its citizens in January.

Britain could give regulatory approval to Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine as early as this week, even before the US authorises it, the UK’s Telegraph newspaper reported on Sunday. Pfizer and BioNTech could secure emergency US and European authorisation for their Covid-19 vaccine next month after final trial results showed a 95% success rate and no serious side effects.

Moderna last week released preliminary data for its vaccine showing 94.5% effectiveness.

The better-than-expected results from the two vaccines, both developed with new messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, have raised hopes of an easing of a pandemic that has killed more than 1.3 million people.