My Lords, I offer my unreserved congratulations to the Government, their scientists and the National Health Service on the signal success of getting to the point where the Oxford vaccine is available to us. We are entering the last phase of this struggle. I in no way share the gripes of those of my colleagues who have expressed them. The best that can be said for them is that if they had been in charge, they might possibly have made different mistakes. I think the Government’s record has been one that we will look back on, if not with pleasure then at least with confidence that they have done as well as anyone might expect under the circumstances.
When it comes to the vaccine rollout, I join the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, and my noble friends Lady McIntosh of Pickering and Lady Altmann in being concerned that there are some signs that the rollout is being held up by an insistence on good practice, which is appropriate in normal times but not now. We really must not let the best be the enemy of the good. Every day’s delay is another day’s deaths.
I cannot see what the difficulties are in, say, chucking the vaccine out to pharmacies. There are 65,000 pharmacies in this country and they are all used to administering flu vaccines; if they were administering 15 Covid vaccines a day, we would be doing 1 million a day in total. It is well within our capacity to get this out while accepting a few imperfections in the cause of a much-reduced tally of deaths.
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