The line has moved from vaccinating the whole country in as short a time as possible, to vaccinating half the population to most people not getting vaccinated.
Quite the shift that has quietly happened.
If vaccine availability is an issue they need to be honest. There are 7billion people in the world, it’s not a silly excuse.
Personally, I would want it. I work in an environment where it’s very difficult to socially distance, and I’m with 30 other people in a small room with no masks.
Hey ho.
It’s all logistics coupled with what the vaccine actually achieves and how it works. These will all guide the rollout.
It’s almost a certainty that it would require a booster dose. So the timing of that needs to be factored in, particularly with regard to when that boost needs to be given. If it’s 6 months for example, then does it leave the time to begin vaccinating down the age groups before you have to actually go back to the initial groups for the boost again.
That timescale also feeds into planning - it’s unlikely you want the mass vaccination for either initial or booster dose to fall at certain times if nurses and GPs are involved - you don’t really want to pull them from normal duty for this at the busiest time’s of the year for little gain in preventing serious disease (if it’s the young you are doing at that time). You also want to time it right with respect to when we expect to see increases in infections - it’s less valuable to have vaccinated half the population to give protection over the summer when infections will likely be very low, only for it to begin to wane just at the point infections could be significantly increasing - next winter basically.
It sounds like some data has been seen by those in charge, including Van-Tam. Maybe what this shows has fed into a more concrete plan for this vaccination. Of course, the knowledge of the prime timescale for the boost will only be coming clear over the next couple of months - we are only 6 months after those first vaccinations who will still be being followed closely trying to measure what protection it still provides.