Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:57 pm on 12 January 2021.
Llywydd, I have been in—[Inaudible.]—between the injection and the infection, and that is the race that I am focused on and the health Minister is focused on: making sure that we maximise our capacity to use whatever supply of vaccine comes our way as a result of the UK Government's procurement of it. Let me be clear, Llywydd—I'm grateful for the opportunities that there have been to discuss this with the UK Government. I discussed it with the other First Ministers and with Michael Gove on Wednesday of last week. I expect to have another discussion tomorrow. The health Ministers met on Thursday of last week, and I'm quite confident that everything that can be done is being done by all four nations to get supplies of the vaccine and to get it to where they are needed and to use it as fast as possible. That's the race that we are involved in here in Wales.
Of course we want to use as many qualified contractors to help us in that effort, and I'm hugely grateful to the enormous response that we have had from GP practices the length and breadth of Wales. I think every single GP practice in the Hywel Dda area has signed up to deliver the vaccine, and we will be deploying community pharmacists as well. The first community pharmacy to deliver the vaccine will be by the end of this week, and that will be in north Wales. There are, as I'm sure Paul Davies understands, some practical things that have got to be sorted out, and you've got to have a bit of a chance to make sure that everything is being done in the best and safest way. You've got to give it a bit of a chance to allow that to be tested. We will test that with community pharmacy in north Wales before the end of this week, and then we will want to use community pharmacists in all parts of Wales. They were very much part of our effort to deliver flu vaccine over the autumn: 1,100,000 people received flu vaccination in Wales over the autumn period, and that just demonstrates the capacity of the system here in Wales to deliver vaccination on a mass scale, using all the different levers available to us. We want people who are retired to come back to help us with that effort. That is how the people that the leader of the opposition referred to knew about that. They'd had an invitation. They'd had a request to come back. Now, we still have to make sure that returning staff are properly equipped for the job we're asking them to do. Even if you're an experienced vaccinator, you've never used these vaccines; you've got to be trained in using these particular vaccines. You need to know the potential ab reactions that there may be to it and that does have to be in place in order for people to be able to operate successfully, effectively and safely. I want those barriers to be the minimum possible, but they've still got to be there to safeguard the person who is carrying out the job and to give confidence to the people who are being vaccinated.