Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:52 pm on 12 January 2021.
Well, Llywydd, the leader of the opposition is right that the race is against the virus, not against any other part of the United Kingdom. That race will be run not over a week, but over months and months ahead. We will still be vaccinating people here in Wales well into the final months of this calendar year, and what I was trying to explain to people is that that will have to be a sustained effort, not something that is just over and done with in a few days or a week. We are going to have to gear up to make sure that we are flat out right across the system to vaccinate the maximum number of people as quickly and as safely as possible.
Let me deal with the first point that the leader of the opposition made, Llywydd, to make sure that people understand the position here. We are using every bit of the Oxford vaccine that we get as soon as we get it—22,000 doses last week; we expect 25,000 doses this week; 80,000 and maybe a bit more than that next week; and then a rising, and, let's hope, rapidly rising, volume of supply. With the Pfizer vaccine, we received the majority of those 2,800 doses just around Christmas. They have to last us until the end of the first week of February. They're not given to us to use in a few days; that is the supply Wales has for the whole of January and the first week of February as well. And that's why it would never have been a sensible proposition to have suggested that we should have used the whole of that supply in the first few days. That supply has to be evened out over the weeks for which it is available, so that we have vaccinators with work to do in every week able to make the very most of that supply. And the Member will remember that, on 31 December, the advice of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation changed. At that point, we thought we would have to halve that supply, because we needed to be able to deliver two doses of it to everybody within the time that we had that vaccine to use. On 31 December, that advice was changed, and I think it was the right thing to do. It will save, we think, 10,000 people here in Wales from contracting coronavirus, to be able to use a first dose of that vaccine for people more rapidly. But the reason why it hasn't all been used in the first few days is because it's got to last us for six weeks.