A to V: The Roadmap to Vaccinating Britain
Jazz FM Business Breakfast's Nick Howard looks at the journey a COVID-19 vaccine needs to take over the coming weeks and months
Last updated 24th Nov 2020
A to V: The Roadmap to Vaccinating Britain - Context
This week AstraZeneca, working with the University of Oxford, became the latest pharmaceutical company to publish preliminary success rates for their COVID-19 vaccine.
Itās become a race for headlines, as even the sceptical among us want to believe that a pinprick of science can inoculate us against another year of closed pubs, online shopping, and Zoom birthdays.
With regulators poised to grant approval for vaccines, the story moves onto the logistics of rolling out the treatment across the world. In this Business Breakfast special report, A to V: The Roadmap to Vaccinating Britain, we examine the issues transportation companies will be grappling with in carrying millions of doses of refrigerated glass vials, the impact on medical staff in taking on a mass vaccination programme, and the concerns over how to communicate this to the public.
36% of the general public are uncertain or unlikely to get vaccinated, according to a recent national survey. Thatās a big problem if you want the UK to gain herd immunity, for which roughly 80% of the population would need to be inoculated.
There are also real concerns about the speed at which the vaccine has been developed, and the possibility of mandatory vaccinations ā something which weāre told arenāt under consideration but which the Health Secretary Matt Hancock has refused to rule out.
This is a herculean task which this government must grapple with, but skill at public messaging has famously been the strength which propelled them to power. Itās a skill which would be perfectly appropriate for rediscovery to handle this situation.
The programme also raises questions over the possible collision of two major themes of 2020 ā the pandemic, and Brexit. What happens if lorries carrying vaccine are caught up in the congestion at the ports which logistics firms are concerned is inevitable in the first weeks of January? And what if the IT systems which would be essential for fast-tracking medicine through the queues, and which havenāt been fully tested, donāt work the first time?
With weeks to go until the end of the year, time is running out for the government to fill the public information gap and put paid to the reasonable anxieties which are otherwise flourishing unchecked.