Prime Minister Warns Against ‘Complacency’ as UK Sets out Vaccination Plan

Prime Minister Boris Johnson watches first responder Caroline Cook getting her vaccination as he visits a vaccination centre at Ashton Stadium in Bristol, England, on Jan. 11, 2021. Eddie Mulholland/WPA Pool/Getty Images

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday warned against “false complacency” as the UK government set out its plan for the largest vaccination programme in British history.

In the UK COVID-19 vaccines delivery plan, published on Monday, the government said that tens of millions of people will be immunised against the CCP virus by the spring at over 2,700 vaccination sites across the UK.

But Johnson said this is “a very perilous moment because everyone can sense the vaccine is coming in—my worry is that will breed false complacency.”

The government and the NHS have mobilised more than 80,000 health professionals to help in the vaccine delivery programme.

According to the government plan, by the end of January everyone in England will be within 10 miles of a vaccination site, and there will be capacity to deliver at least 2 million vaccinations in England per week.

All adults in England will be offered a vaccine by the autumn, the government said.

Last Friday, the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine became the third to be approved by the UK authorities after the Pfizer/BioNTech and the Oxford/AstraZeneca jabs.

So far, 2.4 million doses of CCP virus vaccines have been administered in the UK, Johnson said while visiting a vaccination centre in Bristol.

He said roughly 40 percent of 80-year-olds in the country had been vaccinated already as well as 23 percent of the elderly residents of care homes.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the vaccine roll-out has had an “incredible start” and the vaccine deployment plan “sets out exactly how we will harness these efforts to expand the programme quickly and safely.”

But he warned that “it does not mean we can be complacent and it is mission critical that everybody abides by the restrictions in the coming weeks.”

Last week, Johnson put the whole of England under the third national lockdown since the COVID-19 pandemic began last spring.

Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, said on Monday that the next few weeks will be the “worst weeks” of the pandemic, and the country must “double down” on lockdown measures before the vaccine roll-out begins to have an impact on the spread of the disease.

Simon Veazey and Reuters contributed to this report.