JOHN Swinney has promised that the Scottish Government will hit its target of vaccinating all over-70s by the middle of February.
The Deputy First Minister said "good progress" was being made in the roll out of the jag, but he faced criticism from the Tories and LibDems, who said Scotland was going too slow compared to the rest of the UK.
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As of 8.30am on Tuesday, 437,900 people in the country had received the first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, up by 22,498 on the previous day.
More than half – 51% – of people aged over 80 in the community have been given a first dose, along with 98% of frontline health and social care workers, 95% of residents in older adult care homes, and 83% of staff in these homes.
Across the UK as a whole, 78.7% of over 80s have now had their first dose.
In Holyrood, Tory front bencher Jamie Greene said the Scottish Government’s roll-out was "sluggish".
He asked if Swinney was “fully confident that the target to vaccinate all over 70s and the clinically vulnerable by the middle of February will still be achieved, or has that now slipped, just as the target to vaccinate the over 80s did?”
The Tory also pointed to reports that Scotland had now been supplied with a total of 984,000 doses of the two vaccines.
He asked the Deputy First Minister to “please explain to everyone who cannot understand what the holdup is, why half a million doses of this vaccine is not getting out faster to our gps and into people's arms?”
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Swinney said: “There are not 500,000 doses of the vaccine in our hands in Scotland able to be used at this present moment. There are more vaccines that have been allocated to Scotland than are in our hands, and they will be drawn down as soon as the distributors are able to verify those supplies, and to distribute them on to us in Scotland and that's the orderly path that we have taken.”
The SNP MSP defended the speed of the roll-out, saying the Government's initial priority had been to get a jag in the arm of all care home residents, a much more time consuming and labour intensive process.
He added: “So, let me reassure parliament and members of the public that good progress has been made on the delivery of the vaccine for the over 80s.
"We have already got to over 95% of our care home residents. We know the care home residents are the ones who are the most at risk of co-morbidity from Covid. We are in a majority now with the over-80s, and that task will be completed by the end of the first week in February, and we will move on to the next priority grouping and complete that by the middle of February as announced."
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