Coronavirus Bristol: Mass vaccination centre stands ready to receive its first patients

A mass vaccination centre set to jab four people per minute has been kitted out ready to receive its first patients on Monday – after Boris Johnson vowed to treat hundreds of thousands of people each day by next Friday.  

Empty chairs have been placed a metre apart in the waiting area of Ashton Gate Stadium, which is usually home to Bristol City F.C. and the Bristol Bears.

It comes after Prime Minister Boris Johnson admitted earlier this week the vaccination plan needs to speed up as figures revealed only one in 10 care home residents, and 14 per cent of staff, had been vaccinated so far.

Photographs from inside the vast stadium show desks hidden behind partitions to allow those being vaccinated some privacy from those awaiting the jab.

All the necessary equipment – and boxes of the AstraZeneca vaccine – has been moved into the stadium ahead of its opening on Monday, when hundreds of elderly Bristolians will go to be protected from the virus that has so far killed 79,833 in the UK. 

Some 1,035 people have died of coronavirus in Britain today in the deadliest Saturday since April 18, as a further 59,937 people tested positive.

Meanwhile, the Queen, 94, and Prince Philip, 99, have joined more than 1.5million people across Britain who have been given the jab since the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was approved for use in December.  

In other coronavirus developments today: 

Rishi Sunak could delay tax rises until next autumn because he reportedly believes it is the ‘wrong time’ for them but will end Stamp Duty holiday in March;Police vow to issue fines ‘much quicker’ as scientists blame the public for not following the rules as closely as they did in the first lockdown;Coronavirus outbreaks in care homes more than doubled in a fortnight over the New Year period, after it emerged that only ten per cent of residents had been vaccinated;Some schools are still more than half full as attendance soars much higher than the first lockdown and parents are urged to keep children at home where possible;Doctors in packed London hospitals ‘have to choose who gets intensive care and prioritise young people with highest survival chances’;Police who fined two women £200 for socially-distanced country walk are slammed by ex-chief constable who says ‘if police don’t act fairly, public won’t comply’;Dozens of anti-lockdown protesters are confronted by police as they march on Clapham Common chanting ‘take your freedom back’.

The UK has since permitted the use of the Oxford University/AstraZeneca jab, alongside an inoculation against coronavirus developed by Moderna.   

News of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh’s vaccination is unusual from Buckingham Palace, which rarely comments on the private health matters of the royal couple.    

It is understood the Queen decided the information should be made public to prevent inaccuracies and further speculation.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman said: ‘The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have today received Covid-19 vaccinations.’ 

However, when asked by MailOnline, the palace refused to indicate which out of the two available vaccines the couple had been given. 

Earlier this week the Prime Minister revealed seven mass coronavirus vaccination centres will open next week to turbo-charge efforts to get jabs to millions of people and pull the UK out of a relentless cycle of lockdowns.

The hubs will be based in sports venues, conference centres and a science park in Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham, Stevenage, Bristol, Surrey and Newham in central London. They will be operated by NHS staff and volunteers. 

Number 10 has not yet revealed how many vaccinations will take place at the huge venues but they are expected to build up to each doing tens of thousands per week, MailOnline understands. It is a minimum requirement for any public immunisation centre to manage 1,000 weekly doses, and these centres will be some of the largest in the UK. It has previously been claimed that they will be able to deliver 5,000 doses a day.

In its biggest ever vaccination drive, Britain is hoping to get around 13million people immunised against Covid-19, focusing on elderly people, health and care workers and people with serious illnesses, by the middle of February. 

If this is achieved the current national lockdown – the toughest since March 2020 – may be eased, but experts have warned they will need to ramp up the roll-out in order to hit the ambitious target.  

Politicians have been trying to shift blame for disruptions to the initial supply of Oxford and Pfizer vaccines, with Boris Johnson first blaming quality checks done by the MHRA and Matt Hancock later trying to pin difficulties on limited manufacturing capacity.

The Health Secretary said in Parliament: ‘The rate-limiting factor is the amount of the actual juice available, the actual vaccine, which is not manufactured like a chemical it is effectively… a biological product.’ He described the vaccine manufacturing process as ‘complicated and difficult’. 

And Britain felt a pang of envy as Europe approved the Moderna vaccine and will start to get deliveries of the 95 per cent effective jab from next week, while Brits must wait until March because officials didn’t pre-order it.   

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman announced the mass vaccination centres had been set up in the country.

The Etihad Tennis Centre, Manchester, and Epsom Racecourse, Surrey, are both to be used for giving out vaccines, alongside Robertson House, Stevenage, the Centre for Life, Newcastle, the Ashton Gate Stadium, Bristol, and Birmingham’s Millenium Point.

The Press Association news agency reported five other locations are also being considered as vaccine hubs.

These were the Derby Arena, Black Country Living Museum, Dudley, Malvern’s Three Counties Showground, Worcestershire, Villa Park the home of Aston Villa FC, and Leicester Racecourse.

The Health Service Journal previously reported that the NHS was looking at setting up more than 40 mass Covid vaccination centres, and were planning on recruiting up to 40,000 staff. 

It comes after supermarket chain Morrisons confirmed car parks at three stores in Yeovil, Wakefield and Winsford would host drive-through vaccinations from Monday, with a further 47 offered to the Government.

Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur have also offered the use of their stadium to the NHS as a venue to roll out the coronavirus vaccine.

High street pharmacies including Superdrug and Boots will start to dish out vaccines from next week and other businesses have come out of the woodwork to offer their premises for jab locations. 

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society said there were thousands of high street pharmacies ‘ready, willing and able’ to assist in the rollout of the programme, which will require jabbing a mammoth 3million Brits a week if Boris Johnson is to hit his target of loosening lockdown rules by mid-February. 

There is growing clamour for the process to be ramped up dramatically – with concerns that local chemists and other facilities are not being used enough.  

The Royal College of GPs warned Number 10 must ditch its ‘bureaucratic barriers’ and start recruiting pharmacists if it wants the roll out to be a success, while the National Pharmacy Association claimed it was a ‘no-brainer’ that local chemists are brought on board because the nation was ‘crying out for convenient access to the vaccine’.

Sandra Gidley, president of the RPS, said small high street pharmacies could help administer an extra 1million doses a week and bolster the lagging rollout. She told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: ‘We are already used to delivering the flu vaccine. You have got an army of trained vaccinators who are ready, willing and able to play and part.

‘With the AstraZeneca vaccine there is no reason why that could not be delivered through community pharmacies. There are over 11,000 pharmacies. If each of those does 20-a-day that is 1.3 million-a-week extra vaccines that can be provided, very often to those who are hardest to reach. Why would any government not want to do that?’