THE success of the vaccine programme means that the Scottish Government may not have to rely on “tough restrictions” going forward, Nicola Sturgeon has said.

As of today, the First Minister announced, more than five million doses of the vaccine have been administered in Scotland.

The SNP leader said during a Covid-19 briefing on the state of the pandemic that the Government is now increasingly monitoring “to what extent vaccination plays in breaking the link between rising case numbers and serious hospitalisation or death”.

Although the data is still under review, Sturgeon said that it gives “cautious optimism” that the Government will rely on enhanced public health measures such as testing as we move forward out of the pandemic.

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The First Minister said: “Now, while we are still developing our understanding of the impact of vaccination – and given that people’s health and, in some cases, lives are at stake – a significant degree of caution is still appropriate.

"That is why we have so far kept Glasgow in Level 3.

"However, increasingly, we are monitoring whether and to what extent vaccination might be breaking that link between rising case numbers and significantly rising cases of serious illness and death. And if that is the case, we hope that our response can evolve too.

"In short, while care will still be needed, it may mean that we don’t have to react quite so aggressively with tough restrictions in the face of rising case numbers.

"Instead, we may be able to rely more on enhanced public health interventions like testing and vaccination, and on good public health practices on the part of the public.

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"This will be a key factor in our decision making in the next couple of weeks and beyond – both in relation to Glasgow and the country more generally."

Sturgeon added that the vaccination programme "changes the game in some respects" compared to how the government dealt with previous waves of the virus.

She said: "If vaccination is breaking, it won’t break completely the link between case numbers and hospitalisation, if you recall Jason [Leitch] on Friday explained you have a spectrum of people with the virus having no symptoms through to the other end where people might die, and what the vaccination does is hopefully push people down that spectrum and reduces the severity of illness.

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"So you will still get people being hospitalised but not, we hope, to anything like the same extent, and those who are hospitalised, hopefully are not as seriously ill as they would have been had they not had the vaccination.

"There’s got to be a point to us having a mass population wide vaccination programme and that is it does allow us to change how we deal with this virus and deal with it in a way that has much less restriction on our day to day life."

Sturgeon added that the Government is now in an "almost transition" period between how the virus is currently dealt with, such as restrictions and levels, to how the Government hopes to deal with it, by focussing on enhanced public health measures such as testing. 

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Chief medical officer Gregor Smith agreed that the vaccine programme was an "absolute critical part" of the Scottish Government's reponse and getting closer to normality in our daily lives.

He said: "We’re in this very fortunate position now we’ve got the vaccine programme just now which is going to do a lot of that heavy lifting for us, now and in the future, as we start to complete those second doses because the evidence, the very early evidence, that we’re seeing even against 1617 [April-02 variant], is the vaccine programme is going to have a very positive impact on reducing the proportion of people who would symptomatic infection and therefore be able to pass it on to other people.

"I’m really encouraged by some of those initial results."

In total, 3,138,366 people have received the first dose of a vaccine, an increase of 16,421 since yesterday, and 29,035 got a second dose yesterday, bringing the total number to 1,881,214.