THE national clinical director has hit back at accusations Scotland’s vaccination programme has been moving too slowly.
Professor Jason Leitch said that the vaccine roll-out had been slower north of the Border as Scotland had chosen a more “person-centred” approach to vaccinations.
He also told the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland that he did not like the “competitive nature of the vaccination story” and Scotland’s position at the bottom varied depending on which “league table” the media chose to highlight.
The national clinical director was challenged on the vaccination statistics from Sunday January 31. Whereas England reported completing around 289,000 jags that day, Scotland did just 9628.
Although he said comparisons on other weekdays showed Scotland in a much better light, Leitch admitted Sundays were a “bit tricky”.
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He argued the low figures were due to the informed choices of the Scottish Government and the fact that GP surgeries are often closed on Sundays.
Leitch said: “We decided to do the over-80s, and some people think this wasn’t the right thing to do, but we decided to do the over-80s in their own practices, where they would know their nurses and where they would know their GPs, where they would be close to home and not make them travel to bigger centres.
“Other countries have done that differently. That’s a choice about person-centred vaccinations.”
Leitch also said that, apart from “a few stragglers” who have refused the vaccine or are positive for Covid, Scotland would finish the vaccine roll-out to the over-80s this week.
Leitch was challenged on whether Scotland should have focused more on speed rather than this people-centred approach given the importance of time in the vaccine roll-out.
He responded: “We agree, we do need to be doing it faster. That’s why now, as we’ve gone down a level to the people who are a little bit more mobile [like the over-70s], they are now being done in big vaccination centres or semi-big vaccination centres that will be a little bit of a journey from home.”
He said the shift would mean that we would see “many many more [Covid jags] being done this weekend”.
Scotland’s national clinical director also hit out at vaccination comparisons to England suggesting Scotland was somehow doing worse than south of the Border through the pandemic.
However, he did admit that the competitive drive may be pushing Scotland to do better.
Leitch said: “It’s a race against the virus, not a race against my colleagues in England. I want England to be vaccinated as they can possibly do it. I also want Wales and Northern Ireland to be vaccinated.
“I don’t really like the competitive nature of the vaccination story. I understand why we’re doing it, and actually it drives us on a little but it’s probably no bad thing.
“But, it depends which league table you represent. Our prevalence is half of the English prevalence. Our mortality is two-thirds of the English mortality. So it depends which league table you want to demonstrate about how the pandemic is going.
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“The fact is we have got friends, relatives, workers across the Border, so we need England to be vaccinated and England needs Scotland to be vaccinated.”
Elsewhere on the programme, the professor stressed that lockdown was working albeit slowly. He said that while the virus gets out of control very rapidly, it takes much longer to bring it back to manageable levels.
Leitch said that the progress which had been meant that changes may be made to lockdown restrictions, with children being the number one priority.
However, he stressed it is “not time to get back to normal for schools”.
After Leitch left the programme, the BBC said the latest figures showed that England had vaccinated 17.8% of its adult population. Wales are reportedly on 16.1%, Northern Ireland on 14.8%, and Scotland on 12.7%.
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