Thread by @mattuthompson

Vaccine minister @nadhimzahawi now in front of the Science Committee. I will be watching so you don't have to ;)

Vaccine minister @nadhimzahawi tells the Science Committee that the Govt is not releasing the number of doses it expects every week, because of the way each batch of vaccine has to be checked, so the numbers "move around".

Chair Greg Clark asks if Zahawi is confident the Govt's target of 14m vaccinated by mid-Feb will be met.

Zahawi: "I'm confident we will absolutely meet our target, though there will be daily fluctuations”

Greg Clark on vaccine rollout: "Why wasn't it like Sunderland on election night? With everyone ready to go?"

Spoken like a true elections nerd.

Zahawi replies that Govt thought it was better to forensically target the vulnerable rather than just vaccinate as fast as possible.

Graham Stringer MP to @nadhimzahawi : "You seem phobic to numbers. Why can't you tell us the vaccine capacity that's online? Why can't you give us predictions week by week?"

@LBC

Zahawi replies that it is the opposite, and that he is "disappointed in the question". The Government has committed to publishing daily vaccination numbers.

Stringer says he still hasn't answered the questions.

Zahawi says the questions about how much vaccine is available right now are the wrong ones:

"There is no stock, we don't want vaccines sitting on shelves rather than in people's arms"

Implication is that it's a rolling distribution system, with jabs given as soon as received

AstraZeneca's boss raised concerns about the people producing the vaccine not having been vaccinated. Potential disruption to supply chain.

Zahawi commits to write to the Committee by the end of the week with a firm decision on whether vaccine producers should be vaccinated.

Zahawi says the delivery of vaccines to GP surgeries etc has an accuracy of 98.5%.

He admits: "Sometimes a Primary Care Network is expecting X number of boxes and they don’t get it, or there’s a delay in the delivery."

But 98.5% of the time what is promised is delivered.

.@zarahsultana asks whether the Government has considered prisons as a priority for vaccination, given they are a high-risk setting.

Zahawi responds the focus for now is on individual risk, rather than setting, but that includes vulnerable people in prison.

Vaccine minister @nadhimzahawi confirms that supply is the "rate-limiting factor" in the vaccine rollout.

Translation: "We have more capacity to administer vaccines than we have vaccines to administer"

But he says that's a normal part of manufacturing process & will improve.

Zahawi confirms that we will be able to vaccinate 2m people a week by the end of the month, and that it will go higher than that.

It will of course have to go higher than that to meet the Government's 14m target by mid-February.

Are there plans for vaccine passports so people can come out of lockdown or travel abroad?

Zahawi: "There are no plans for a vaccine passport. We don't know what the impact of vaccines are on transmission, and it would be discriminatory."

To what extent is the Government preparing for the next set of vaccines, if/when the virus eventually mutates?

Zahawi: "We've made an investment in development and manufacturing so we can be ready"

Says the new mRNA vaccine can be rapidly changed and produced if virus mutates.

If there was a sudden mutation that was resistant to vaccines, Zahawi says:

"We can be ready - within a period of 30 to 40 days we would have the next vaccine being manufactured"

That's reassuring.

@LBC

Vaccine minister @nadhimzahawi on the target of 14m vaccinated by mid-February:

“It is deliverable but incredibly ambitious, pushed a little bit beyond the deliverable by Boris Johnson I think… it’s a stretch target!"