I've spent the day looking at the data on the UK's vaccination programme

It feels dangerously optimistic to say so but there are strong signs that things are going to be.... not awful

A thread on where we're at

Today was a good day for the vaccination programme. It's not just that more than 3m people have now been vaccinated. Yesterday was the first day more than 300,000 people were vaccinated in a single day

Can this progress continue? Ministers have always said that the limiting factor is the vaccine supply, but there have been no official statistics published on on how many vaccines the UK has got and when we can expect to get them

Until this week

On Wednesday, the Scottish government published its vaccine delivery plan, which included a projection of the number of vaccine doses that Scotland expects to get from the UK every week until the end of May

The UK government wasn't happy about this, apparently because it was worried about the reaction of the pharmaceutical companies https://www.expressandstar.com/news/uk-news/2021/01/14/scotlands-vaccine-deployment-plan-taken-down-after-uk-ministers-concerns/

But @robblackie_oo was too quick. He saved the vaccine numbers - and what they show is incredibly revealing https://twitter.com/robblackie_oo/status/1349616213132009474?s=19

This is what those numbers look like as a graph. You can see instantly how much the UK is relying on the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, although for some reason its supply to Scotland is inconsistent

Yet what really stands out is the total

If you add all those doses together, you get around 6.6m. As we know the Scottish adult population and the number of people in the priority groups, this allows us to start putting dates on when people might get vaccinated

Here's my very rough first go

Fyi: My numbers are different to the ones in the Scottish government vaccination plan, because I'm talking about supply and offers

They've gone and put dates on when people in the priority groups will get vaccinated, assuming take-up of 80%

Dose 1: early May
Dose 2: early July

You can also extrapolate from Scotland to the UK as a whole, assuming vaccine is supplied on a per capita basis. This is obviously a bit rough and ready but I'm told by someone who has experience of government vaccination programmes that it's pretty close to the reality

This chart by the brilliant @_GaneshRao is what you get for the UK as a whole

It goes a long way to explaining why ministers are so confident about the 15m vaccine target. According to this, they'll have 20m doses by mid-Feb. That's plenty

Now I know what you're thinking: how can this go wrong? Lots of ways, obviously, from manufacturing to getting jabs in arms

The latest SAGE minutes suggest only 28% of black ethnic groups will volunteer to have the vaccine. I've heard that's already an issue for GPs

But before you start feeling gloomy, look back at the Scottish vaccine plan. It's assuming 5% wastage. In reality, it says, the wastage rate is 1%

*too gloomy. Vaccine inequality is something to feel very gloomy about. But at least if we have the vaccine we can do something about it

There's more reason to be optimistic about supply. The Scottish government says that its projections cautiously use the *worst case* scenario provided by the Westminster government

In other words, it's quite possible that things will go better than these numbers suggest

I'm going to end this thread with a statement that feels like it can't be right, but on the basis of the data and conversations with sources, I believe it is justified

The government is preparing to under-promise and over-deliver on vaccines

There, I said it

I'm now regretting that last tweet. While I can see the political benefit of hiding vaccine supply numbers, publishing them has clear advantages for public confidence and (imho) v.few disadvantages for pharma relationships

Of course I'm biased but these figures should be public

Second person today to tell me this. If the six dose rule holds true across the board that would be an amazing boost https://twitter.com/samtapsell/status/1350223314048983040?s=19

Sunday Telegraph reporting that every adult in "Britain"* could be vaccinated by the end of June. Sounds unlikely, but not completely impossible, although supply would have to come in very quickly for that to happen

*NI is part of the UK-wide vaccine plan

My analysis, using numbers rather than anonymous sources. Remember there's a delay between getting the vaccine and putting it in someone's arm, so to have actually vaccinated every adult by the end of June would be very rapid indeed https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-every-uk-adult-could-be-vaccinated-by-mid-july-if-these-figures-are-anything-to-go-by-12188909