NHS vaccine centres are offering Covid jabs to friends and family aged under 70 in breach of national policy, The Telegraph can disclose.
Senior NHS sources threatened to take disciplinary action against hospitals and GPs across the country offering leftover jabs to relatives and friends of staff despite being outside the top four priority cohorts.
Health bosses have insisted that drawing up a ‘friends and family list’ helps avoid waste by ensuring that they never throw away any Pfizer vaccine, which comes in boxes of 975 doses and can only be stored for five days once thawed.
However, ministers are understood to be determined that younger people with a connection to NHS staff should not be allowed to “jump the queue” over the vulnerable and elderly.
If the stuff would be wasted without an arm to put it into then there’s no queue being jumped, is there?
This is akin to that EU idiocy, not buying more Pfizer because that would be unfair to Sanofi.
Fairness ain’t the correct criteria here.
Same stupidity as New York. If you are running out of time to give the vaccine to the preferred recipients, give it to anybody willing to take it.
Oh, and do the Israeli thing and break the boxes in to smaller packs up at the final distribution point.
In tomorrow’s Telegraph:
Millions Of £ Wasted On Unused Vaccines.
’ However, ministers are understood to be..’
Name and shame!
I’m sure our Aussie bureaucrats are stupid as yours, but I can’t think of a particular incident.
Oops—-the new-born baby who died because the border between Qld and NSW was shut.
If the stuff would be wasted without an arm to put it into then there’s no queue being jumped, is there?
No, but. Humans being humans, once you normalise nepotism amongst those dishing out meds for a (believed to be) deadly disease, there will be a tendency towards finding fewer legitimate patients.
Sure, allocate unused doses (for which there will be no shortage of ready recipients). But for “friends and family”? Really?
Surely the thing to do would be to create a list of eligible people who are happy to come at short notice and then just send out texts to the list – x doses available after 4pm, first come first served!
It is a little bit problematic because of the need for a timely second dose. Oh, wait…
Did you see the tale of the Labour MP who jumped a queue for the jab and publicly boasted of his cunning?
He later changed his story so that it turned on pure happenstance.
The person whom he displaced from getting the jab was an NHS worker.
“If the bums don’t come to the soup kitchen for leftover food from the restaurant, then no one can.”