Doncaster vaccination programme set to last ten months – with 5,000 vaccinated a day

Information published by Derbyshire CCG has outlined some of the plans in place for mass vaccinations in neighbouring South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw.

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust was named this week as one of the ‘vaccination hubs’, and will be responsoble for the storage and distribution of the Pfizer vaccine, which will begin to be rolled out next week.

Sheffield’s director of public health Greg Fell has said that the NHS and his department will ‘pull out all the stops’ to get the city’s population vaccinated as quickly as possible.

The CCG papers have given more detail on how this would look in South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw (SYB), listing three kinds of testing site that will be available.

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The documents said: “The infrastructure for the national Covid-19 vaccination programme continues to be developed.

"SYB is expecting one regional vaccine hub for storage and distribution and which will be integral to implementation.

"Plans also include three levels of vaccination sites – fixed mass (big venues near major transport routes such as motorways), semi-fixed (reminiscent of mobile CT scanner sites) and mobile units.

"Early discussions suggest that SYB could have two fixed mass, 16 semi-fixed and 130 mobile sites across the patch. An SYB immunisation programme would span 10 months to cover all of the targeted population with an estimate of around 5000 vaccines being administered a day.”

Greg Fell gave a presentation to full council this week following the announcement that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was safe to use.

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He said: “It will take some time to vaccinate the eligible population, it will be a ginormous effort and we cannot relax everything else until we have achieved herd immunity and the estimate is that we are going to need to vaccinate most of the eligible population to achieve herd immunity."

The CCG papers stated: “There are encouraging signs that a vaccine could be made available by late December 2020.

"Should this be the case then SYB would follow the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) guidelines which currently recommend frontline health and care staff and care homes (residents and staff) would likely be among the first to receive the vaccine.”