Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 1:57 pm on 2 December 2020.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 1:57, 2 December 2020

On the 800,000, you're right that our population share will be a little under 40,000 doses, so a little under 20,000 people can be protected, as they need two shots. That'll be dealt with by population size across health boards. There's been agreement on that at the vaccination programme board within Wales. So, again, we won't be saying that, for example, north Wales will have all of the first set of the vaccine and the rest of the country can wait. So, every part of the country will get some coverage.

The UK Government are procuring the vaccine for the whole UK, and we've agreed, in terms of fair shares, the population share that goes into the Barnett formula for each UK country. So, we will get a guaranteed percentage share of any supply into the UK. The confirmation, again, today is that after the first batch of 800,000, we then expect there to be more vaccines being delivered in December. We haven't had exact figures yet, but the indication is that we can expect there to be several million within December. But, as you know, because you need two shots to get coverage, with a population of 60-odd million in the UK, even if we do get, say, 2 million, it won't provide effective population coverage, and that's why we need to be really clear that we need vaccines plural, and more vaccine delivery to come into the UK for us to get that population coverage.

It also relies, of course, on the manufacture of the vaccine in Belgium, and regardless of what happens at the end of the year affecting trading and other relationships, the UK Government have said that if there are any issues about transfer and ports, then they'll fly the vaccine in as well, and they'll take the cost for that. Now, that's important, too, because I think people will be concerned otherwise about the potential supply of the vaccine. We expect quite a lot of this to come into the country overall, and then we expect to understand where we might be with the Oxford vaccine, as well. So, yes, we're taking account of all of those different aspects about our share in Wales and how this can be distributed across Wales. Whenever any new supply comes in, we'll get a share of it, and as that comes in, I fully expect to be updating Members and the public on the amount of supply we're having coming in.