Exclusive: Half a million fewer vaccines being supplied to NHS next week - Telegraph.co.uk

Up to half a million fewer doses of Covid vaccine will be supplied to the NHS next week as Whitehall sources admitted the target of vaccinating priority groups by mid-February was increasingly “tight”.

Deliveries of the Pfizer vaccine will be cut by between 15 and 20 per cent next week after the US firm announced delays in shipments because of work to increase capacity at its Belgian processing plant, sources said.

But Government sources admitted that scheduled deliveries of around 2.8 million doses of Covid vaccine to the NHS will be cut next week to just over 2.3 million doses, partly due to the Pfizer delays.

Ministers also suggested that AstraZeneca was behind schedule after pushing back a target of supplying two million doses a week from the end of this month to mid-February.

One senior Whitehall source said vaccine supply was “constrained,” while another warned the rollout in coming weeks would be “tight and lumpy”.

Sources at Pfizer on Friday night insisted that enough doses supplied by the firm were still “somewhere in the system” to allow the NHS to keep vaccination rates high.

According to delivery schedules published by the Scottish Government, the UK was originally expecting 2.4 million AstraZeneca doses this week rising to 3.2 million next week.

Pfizer deliveries were expected to rise slightly from 1.5 million this week to 1.6 million next week.

However deliveries were already expected to fall sharply in three weeks’ time with AstraZeneca supplies dropping to 1.3 million and Pfizer falling to fewer than a million.

Meanwhile in Canada, authorities have been told not to expect a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine next week.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “In the coming week millions of doses of the vaccines will be delivered and we remain on track to offer first vaccinations to the top four priority groups by mid-February.”?