Keir Starmer echoes calls to deploy all community pharmacies to coronavirus vaccine effort

Following The Yorkshire Post and its sisters titles’ campaign this week calling on the Government to utilise 11,500 community pharmacies to get the vaccination into people’s arms, Sir Keir echoed the demand ahead of a visit to a vaccination centre in Stevenage on Thursday.

Sir Keir will say the Government needs to “match the nation’s ambition” with a 24/7 rollout of jabs.

And has called on ministers to deploy more of England’s community pharmacies past the initial 200 to guarantee vaccines can be delivered on every high street.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson confirmed in Parliament that the drive to get jabs in arms would move to 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as soon as possible.

During Prime Minister’s Questions Mr Johnson said the process of protecting people from coronavirus is already going “exceptionally fast” but “at the moment the limit is on supply” of the vaccine.

“We will be going to 24/7 as soon as we can,” he told MPs, despite Downing Street on Monday saying there was no clamour for such a model.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock will set out further details “in due course”, Mr Johnson said.

But earlier in the day, Mr Hancock questioned whether there would be demand for a round-the-clock vaccination operation.

He said the NHS was “absolutely up for doing that” but “most people want to get vaccinated in the daytime, and also most people who are doing the vaccinations want to give them in the daytime, but there may be circumstances in which that would help”.

Asked by Labour MP for Hull East Karl Turner during Prime Minister’s Questions why more pharmacists were not being used in the programme, Mr Johnson said they would be more vital in the next stage.

Mr Turner said: “The Yorkshire Post highlighted this week that many of the country’s 11,000 community pharmacies stand ready, willing, and able to deliver desperately needed Covid vaccines.

“Yet his Government has seemingly shunned an army of fully trained, experienced, and registered technicians.”

He said pharmacies were “ready to play their part in the national effort” and urged the PM to “take control and fully mobilise the skills and expertise of community pharmacies to get Britain vaccinated”.

But Mr Johnson said that while pharmacies do “an amazing job”, he said: “What we want to ensure is that we get doses to the places where they’re going to be distributed most effectively, the fastest, and I’m sure [Mr Turner] would not want to see doses distributed to places - many, many places - where they might not all be used in the course of the day.

“We need at this stage to avoid any wastage at all, that’s why we’re concentrating on the 233 hospitals, 50 mass vaccination sites, 200 pharmacies already, and we will ramp that up.

“And it will be particularly important as we come into the phase where we need to reach people who are harder to reach, in local communities. And there local pharmacies will play a vital role.”

It comes after Toby Anderson, the UK chief executive of McKesson which runs Lloyds pharmacies, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme pharmacies would need to be able to deliver 1,000 vaccines a week to be part of the programme.

He said: “One of the requirements from the Government has been to have 1,000 jabs per week per site, and if you think about that most community pharmacies are relatively small.”

He said there was an argument that this limit could be lowered to 500 doses as the AstraZeneca vaccine could be kept in smaller quantities.

“This means a company like Lloyd’s for example could easily do 150,000 vaccines a week from say 600 pharmacy locations around the country [...] the industry could probably do between half a million or more vaccinations a week, which is a pretty significant contribution to the overall national effort and why community pharmacy is important to the vaccination centre mix.”

He added: “On average in the UK everybody is under three miles away from a pharmacy, so it provides a lot of convenience and access to healthcare, and that’s particularly important to those people that may find it difficult to travel or get to mass vaccinations centres that are likely to be further away.”

In the Lords, Yorkshire Liberal Democrat peer Lord Scriven said: "Up here in the North, the Yorkshire Post is running a 'shot in the arm' campaign to get the Government urgently to allow the local community pharmacists who are screaming out to get jabs in people’s arms to do so.

"Why are the Government using excuses about batches of 1,000 for the AstraZeneca vaccine getting in the way of using these safe places on the high street that will improve access in the take-up of the vaccine?"

But health minister Lord Bethell said: "I am not sure we are using excuses; we are observing practical matters.

"The priority, quite reasonably, is to get the vaccine in as many arms as possible. We are totally committed to comprehensive distribution of the vaccine that reaches into rural communities and will include working with community pharmacies as important distributors.

"However, be under no illusion: our priority is speed and reach, which is why the deployment has taken the shape it has."

Sir Keir said: “The whole country wants this rollout to succeed. We were the first to get the vaccine and if we get this right and pull together, I know we can be the first country to roll it out successfully.

“To do that, the Government needs to match the nation’s ambition with a 24/7 rollout which harnesses all the expertise and dedication our country has to offer.

“Every high street has a pharmacy and I want to see every possible pharmacy deployed to help.

“Labour will play our part. Labour councils are already stepping up, supporting their communities and making generous offers of support to the Government.

“Across those communities, pharmacists stand ready to play their part too. Let’s use them, and let’s vaccinate Britain.”