4. Statement by the Minister for Health and Social Services: Update on COVID-19 Vaccinations

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:58 pm on 9 February 2021.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 4:58, 9 February 2021

On your final point, there is work in train that Public Health Wales is doing to provide a useful figure on the clinically extremely vulnerable or the former shielded group of people, and the numbers of people that have been reached. I don't think we're going to be able to break them down into condition-specific areas, but for that wider population, you'll understand that requires some work, because whilst we have about 130,000 people in Wales who are on that clinically extremely vulnerable group, many of those are covered in some of the other areas—some of them will be care homes residents, some of them will be people over the age of 80, 70 or 75. So, we need to make sure that we're not double counting them, otherwise I'm sure that you or other Members will be accusing us of overcounting our success rate. 

On your points—your two earlier questions—about the second dose, I think the comparison with England is misleading: essentially, some parts of England jumped the gun and delivered their second doses much earlier. You'll notice, if you look back over the figures, a significant chunk of second doses were delivered many weeks ago when we'd actually agreed at all four nations to follow the advice of the JCVI, and indeed of all of our chief medical officers, about the inter-dose interval—the gap between the first and second dose. That's why you're only seeing a trickle of second doses taking place now, but you can expect to see a much greater number of second doses taking place in the few weeks ahead. And I am confident that when it comes to the first and the second dose, if we have the supply available to us, then we'll continue to go at real pace with first doses and meeting the second dose requirements too.

This is where I think we're going to see more use of, for example, community pharmacy—it was a point I made yesterday: as we need to have even more capacity, we can create extra capacity within our system. And that's only thanks to the level of planning that has gone into this over many months, but also the extraordinary commitment of our staff. It's a real team Wales effort that seems to be successful to date. We'll need much more of that in the weeks and months ahead, and I remain very proud of the work that everybody's doing on all of our behalves.