UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock has ended up with a potentially embarrassing situation on his hands after his visit to a GP surgery which was meant to mark the arrival of a new coronavirus vaccine.
According to The Sun, as he visited the Bloomsbury Surgery in London, Hancock announced that "the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is from, right now, being rolled out to GP surgeries across the country".
"For the first three days of the Oxford vaccine, we did it in hospitals to check that it was working well - and it's working well", he said. "So now we can make sure it gets to all those GP surgeries, like this one, that can do all the vaccinations that are needed."
But while Hancock named the supply of vaccines as the only factor that would slow down the roll-out, it turned out that the very GP surgery he visited "had had its first supply of the Oxford vaccine delayed", the newspaper adds.
"We were expecting our first AstraZeneca 400 today, but we've had a pushback for 24 hours so we're now getting that delivery tomorrow", GP Ammara Hughes told Sky News.
She added that Hancock was surprised to learn that the deliveries, which she asked him to sort out, hadn't arrived.
"It's just more frustrating than a concern, because we've got the capacity to vaccinate and if we had a regular supply, we do have the capacity to vaccinate three to four thousand patients a week", Hughes said.
The newspaper also notes that the health secretary, when he was asked about the delays, said that manufacturers were delivering to a schedule and "that schedule is the amount of vaccine that we have and that’s what GPs will now be delivering".
