COVID 19 Vaccines

The council resumed last week after the Christmas break and understandably, a lot of time has been spent chasing the CCG and NHS to get Covid vaccines more widely available. The leader of Shropshire Council has had two meetings with the CCG and NHS partners and with the Shropshire MPs, as well as meetings with council officers, and expect the numbers of vaccinations to really increase in the next couple of weeks. Although distribution across the county is not yet uniform, which will be our focus over the next few days, everyone is confident that all main groups of vulnerable people will get the vaccine by the middle of February. It is now said that over 9,000 residents in Shropshire have been vaccinated.

From the LGA’s chairman:

“It is heartening to see that more than 2.3 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have now been administered, as the Government published in its UK COVID-19 vaccines delivery plan for vaccinating tens of millions of people by the spring. The plan sets out how the Government will work with the NHS, local councils and the Armed Forces to deliver the largest vaccination programme in British history. Under the plan, there will be capacity to deliver at least two million vaccinations in England per week by the end of January and all residents and staff in care homes across the country will be offered a vaccine by the end of the month. The plans will involve a mixture of delivery models and it was great to see highlighted the benefits of drawing on councils’ knowledge of our communities and the expertise of directors of public health and their teams. In our response, we said that councils want to play their full part in the national rollout and called for more granular information to be shared with councils so we know who in our communities have been vaccinated and where we need to reach out to improve uptake. We also called for more information on the rollout across care homes and other care settings and for social care staff to have equal access to the vaccine as their NHS counterparts.

In the coming weeks the Government’s vaccination programme will be monitored closely by the whole country, including businesses and the Chancellor who have issued fresh warnings. Rishi Sunak has said that the economy would get worse before it gets better as the pandemic unfolds while the Federation of Small Businesses has warned that up to 250,000 small firms will close without improved Government support.

The tragic toll the pandemic has taken was made clear today by the publication of new figures from the Office for National Statistics showing that there were 608,002 deaths recorded in England and Wales in 2020, according to the King’s Fund almost 80,000 more than would be expected based on the average in the previous five years. The vaccine rollout brings hope amid these stark statistics that we will again resume near normal lives. Councils will be central to making this a reality.”