Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:13 pm on 2 December 2020.
Minister, first of all, thank you very much indeed for your statement this morning. It was really informative, one of the best statements, to be honest, that I've seen for a long time from the Government, and it's answered a huge number of the questions that I had. But I do have a couple of little points I just wanted to raise with you. The first was that, in your statement, you say that the time between the vaccines needs to be four weeks. On Friday, I was with a group of others who were assured that, actually, it was a three-week interval. So, can you just clarify that, please?
Could you also please just give us a little bit more detail about how Welsh Government will manage the recall system for the second dose? Because although I understand the Welsh immunisation service is progressing well, it is still, according to information I've been given, in bits; it's still not quite all there together. We then have to recruit an awful lot of staff and make sure that that information works really well and that we can persuade people to come back for that second vaccine.
And really finally, I understand that recent tests of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine have found that having a half dose followed by a full dose is actually far more efficient than having two full doses. This, of course, will increase the amount of vaccine available to Wales and to the UK, and I wondered if you had any update or had any thoughts you could add to that. Thank you very much.