Sadiq Khan calls on government to release daily vaccination data
Sadiq Khan has urged the health secretary to release daily data detailing uptake of the coronavirus vaccine across the UK, in an effort to build public awareness and trust in Britain’s largest ever vaccination programme.
In a letter to Matt Hancock, the mayor of London called for daily reporting on the vaccine programme echoing infection and death statistics published each day by Public Health England.
Data on the Pfizer/Biontech vaccine “would provide a sense of progress as it is rolled out”, Khan said.
He added that figures should be broken down by factors such as age, location, care home, ethnic group, and gender to “better tailor support for different groups”.
The UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) last month acknowledged calls to prioritise the vaccine rollout for black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people, after new analysis showed they are far more likely to be infected with coronavirus.
Currently, older populations, health and social care workers and those with serious underlying health issues are at the top of the UK’s vaccine list.
But the JCVI said it would re-examine the current roster after major new research from the University of Leicester showed that black people are twice as likely to be infected by Covid-19 as white people, while Asian people have a 1.5 times greater risk.
“The JCVI has rightly considered the extensive evidence of the disproportionate impact of the virus on some groups in society, including disabled people, some BAME communities, and individuals living in deprivation,” said Khan.
“Ensuring access to the vaccine for these groups is therefore vital and I reiterate my ask that planning for vaccine distribution and communications includes dedicated consideration of how most effectively to reach groups expected to have low levels of uptake.”
Public Health England already tailors details of its flu vaccination programme for people from minority backgrounds, which typically see a low vaccine uptake. However, it has not explicitly mentioned targeted rollout of the Covid vaccine for BAME communities in its campaign messaging.
The British International Doctors Association (BIDA) earlier this week wrote a letter to Hancock expressing concerns at the exclusion of BAME communities from the UK’s official priority list.
A BIDA spokesperson said the group “would urge the government, Public Health England and the JCVI groups to formulate a sound guidance and include the BAME community, specifying their vulnerability for inclusion and consideration of priority for Covid-19 vaccination. There is still time to rectify this essential omission.’
It comes after 90-year-old Margaret Keenan last week became the first person in the world to receive a coronavirus vaccine outside of a trial, marking the start of Britain’s largest vaccination programme in history.
Almost 138,000 people in the UK received the coronavirus vaccine last week, according to estimates from Britain’s newly-appointed vaccine tsar.
Tweeting the figures on Wednesday, Nadhim Zahawi said they marked “a really good start to the vaccination programme”.
Zahawi said the number of doses administered over the last seven days were 108,000 in England, 7,897 in Wales, 4,000 in Northern Ireland and 18,000 in Scotland.
He confirmed there have been 137,897 vaccines given across the UK so far, meaning around 2,800 people have been vaccinated in each of the 50 hospital hubs distributing the vaccine across the UK.
“That number will increase as we have operationalised hundreds of PCN (primary care networks)” in GP surgeries, Zahawi added.