Nicola Sturgeon urged to be transparent about Covid vaccine roll-out after another timetable slip

Nicola Sturgeon has been urged to be more transparent with the public over the speed of the Covid vaccine roll-out after stating she hoped to accelerate the timetable only a day after she appeared to delay it.

The First Minister said her early May deadline to give at least one dose to all 2.7 million Scots over 50, and younger people with health conditions, was a "cautious prediction".

Raising hopes the target could be reached sooner as Scotland spent its first day in her new lockdown, she said the aim was to accelerate the rollout "as fast as we possibly can" as more details about supply became available.

But her May deadline for only one dose came after Jeane Freeman, the Scottish Health Secretary, told the Scottish Parliament on Dec 23 that the aim was for this entire priority group to receive both doses by the spring.

This also represented a retreat on Ms Freeman's claim the previous month that the entire adult population would be vaccinated with two doses by then.

Ms Sturgeon said some of the "assumptions" Ms Freeman had used when she provided this timescale had changed and argued the media should take account of a rapidly changing situation.

However, no one in the Scottish Government made clear at the time that timetable provided to parliament had slipped again.

The Scottish Tories last night urged Ms Sturgeon to follow Boris Johnson's example and publish daily vaccination figures so the public can "clearly" see whether her government is winning the "race" against the mutant Covid strain.

The First Minister refused to commit to the step, arguing that it could divert manpower from her priority of "getting jags into people's arms."

But she faced growing pressure to provide the key information after the Prime Minister said he would start publishing daily figures on the vaccination roll-out from Monday "so that you can see day by day and jab by jab the progress we are making."

Mr Johnson said the figures on who was getting the vaccines in England and how they were being distributed were of "massive national interest" as he committed to being "as transparent as we can possibly be".

The row broke out as Scotland's mainland went back into full lockdown until at least the end of this month, with Ms Sturgeon arguing the country was in a race between the vaccine rollout and the new, more transmissible variant.

She said the latter meant Covid "has just learned to run much faster", meaning Scotland must try and speed up vaccination and slow the virus with the tough new restrictions.

At the Downing Street press conference, the Prime Minister announced that more than 1.3 million people have been vaccinated against Covid-19 across the UK so far, including 23 per cent of all the over-80s in England.

He added that there was a "prospect" that the coronavirus lockdown in England could be eased in mid-February, if the rollout proceeded as planned.

However Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, cautioned that the vaccine timetable was "realistic but not easy", adding: "The NHS is going to have to use multiple channels to get this out but they are very determined to do this, but that does not make it easy.”

The roll-out of the Oxford-Astra-Zeneca vaccine started on Monday after the UK Government ordered 100 million doses, of which Scotland will get 8.2 per cent based on its population.

Under updated advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), medics no longer need to hold back a second dose to administer to the same person three weeks later.

Instead they can administer the second dose up to 12 weeks after the first, meaning a far greater number of people can be given one dose, which medics say is enough to provide "substantial" protection.

Ms Sturgeon yesterday said her government did not yet have full certainty about supply schedules after this month, but details were being firmed up all the time.

Speaking to the BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme, the first minister said it was difficult to be definitive about when the restrictions would be lifted.

But she said it might be possible to ease some of the rules if the vaccination programme managed to push ahead of the virus in the "race" over the coming months.

"Now, if we manage to do that, then hopefully we will be able to start lifting some of these restrictions while the vaccination programme is ongoing, even in that first phase of it," she said.

However, she said she could not guarantee restrictions would be lifted before May, saying: "I can't be certain about that yet, because it's dependent on us managing to get the levels of infection down."   Ms Sturgeon later refused to echo Mr Johnson, who had promised that more than 13 million people in the four most vulnerable groups will be vaccinated in England by the middle of February.

She said she wanted to and would “bust a gut” to achieve that but argued this could risk "undermining people's confidence in our ability to deliver" if it was not possible to meet the timetable.

Pressed on Ms Freeman's spring deadline for two doses having slipped, she said: "We didn't know whether Astra-Zeneca was going to be approved on the timescale it has been.

"Some of those assumptions have changed as they firmed up and gone along here - that's just the nature of what we are working in." She said she was being "candid" with people that some plans could change.

Asked if she could “guarantee” that no one will wait longer than 12 weeks for the second dose she said: “Clearly, I’m not going to stand here and do that. But the 12 weeks is the advice that we will be designing our vaccination programme around.”

Ms Sturgeon said she would try and make her government's weekly figures on the roll-out more detailed but refused to promise they would be published daily, along with Covid case and death figures.

"Right now I want everybody working in our vaccination teams to be focused on getting this programme up and running, gathering pace, getting vaccines into people's arms" she said.

But Donald Cameron, the Scottish Conservative Shadow Health Secretary, said: “A detailed breakdown each day of how many people have been vaccinated and how much of the vaccine the Scottish Government has received is vital for transparency.

“It would give the public confidence that consistent progress is being made to tackle this pandemic in every part of the country, and some much-needed hope that the current restrictions will come to an end sooner rather than later."

Scotland yesterday recorded 2,529 new Covid cases and 11 further deaths. The test positivity rate stood at 14.8 per cent, well above the five per cent threshold below which the virus is considered under control.

There were 1,347 people in hospital with Covid, up 255 from a week ago and just 173 fewer than the 1,520 during last April’s peak.

The number of people in intensive care stood at 93, up from 28 a week ago but 208 lower than the April peak of 208.