Read on Twitter
Asking the NHS to be ready is hardly planning. Distribution of the vaccine is a mammoth task in it's own. https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1326063409092235265
Obviously the German's are already on it. They've already got a team from 4 different public institutions working on a joint paper on how to handle it. https://twitter.com/Okwonga/status/1325781549883781122?s=20
The UK are going to screw up distribution. I know I'm being a downer, but the last 4 years has taught me this government's primary competence is doing u-turn's and outsourcing things to their mates at above market rates.
So let's figure out how the UK government will screw this up. First... it's the volume of vaccinations needed. I couldn't find a stat for the number of vaccines the NHS administers a year, but the annual birth rate can be a decent proxy.
In 2019, there were 640,370 births in England and Wales, and 12,253 births in Scotland. Not sure what NI was, but lets work off 700,000 births in 2019 as an easy figure for maths.
If we assume that every child in the UK gets three vaccinations, and they all happen in one year, that would be 2.1 million vaccinations a year for newborns.
UK also did approximately 1.7 million flu vaccinations last years. So gives the current capacity for vaccinations at around 3.8million a year. Let's just round that up to 4million.
So UK's current vaccination capacity is 4 million (ish) in a normal year, delivered by a mix of pharmacies (flu), local GP's, and NHS trusts.
Now here is the first challenge. UK has around 65 million people, lets assume their is no constraint on supply of vaccine, and around 80% of the population gets vaccinated in 12 months, that's 52 million people. The Pfizer vaccine requires two doses, so 104 million vaccinations
That's 25x the vaccination capacity of the UK today, if there was no constraint on supply of the vaccine. We know there is definitely constraint of supply. The UK has purchased 30 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, but the US has committed to 100 million doses.
And of course the vaccine was developed in Germany by BioNTech, with assistance from Pfizer. The German government gave BioNTech a $445 million grant to BioNTech for vaccine development.
At best the UK is third in line for the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine. There will be 50 million doses made available in 2020, lets be optimistic and assume the UK gets 10 million of those doses.
For the UK to administer those 10 million doses to 5 million people in 2020 (reality December), it would need to increase vaccination capacity by about 30x to do so, while the NHS is strained at close to capacity.
This isn't going to happen. So let's be slightly more realistic, and assume that the UK can exponentially add capacity at rate of 1.5 per month off a base of 333K vaccinations per month (current capacity), the entire country will be vaccinated in 12 months.
To reach the supposed herd immunity figure of 60% vaccinated, that would be sometime in the 9th month, so August/September 2021.
Is this likely? As more vaccinations happen pressure is relieved off the NHS, and capacity can grow. The UK's vaccination capacity will definitely grow. Not sure it can hit the point where it's vaccinating 6 million people in a month by September.
So what defines the UK's capacity to deliver vaccines? Primarily two parts, one is trained professionals, so nurses and doctors. The other part of the UK's capacity is the supply chain, and in particular storage.
The single biggest constraint the UK will have on delivering the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine will be storage. The vaccine has to be stored at -70C ... what temperature do normal vaccine fridges work at? A mid-range of +5C
Based on storage alone the current UK vaccination capacity for the Pfizer/BioNTech will be close to 0. If the UK government isn't placing large orders for freezers that can store the vaccine at -70C right now, don't expect a rapid rollout of the vaccine anytime soon.
Remembering that Germany, the US, rest of the EU, China, India, etc will also be viaing for the same refrigeration capacity. Reality is herd immunity within UK population will probably be achieved in 2022...
If we're lucky, we might be able to vaccinate enough people early enough in 2021 to avoid a 3rd lockdown.
There are other vaccine candidates, like the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, which doesn't need special storage. It's still in trials and the big question mark on that is it's effectiveness. If it's only 60% effective, will folks want to voluntarily take it?
