England Opens 7 CCP Virus Vaccination Centres

Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health, visits the NHS vaccine centre that has been set up at Epsom Racecourse in Epsom, England on Jan. 11, 2021. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Seven National Health Service (NHS) vaccination centres were opened in England on Monday to accelerate delivery of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus vaccination.

The NHS said these large vaccination centres can deliver thousands of jabs every week, and will be followed by dozens more.

West and East Midlands will share one vaccination centre at the Millennium Point in Birmingham; North East and Yorkshire will share The Centre for Life in Newcastle upon Tyne; The Excel Centre, previously set up as a nightingale hospital, covers London; Ashton Gate in Bristol covers the South West of England; Epsom racecourse in Surrey covers the South East; Etihad Tennis Club in Manchester covers the North West; and Robertson House in Stevenage covers the East of England.

“The initial sites were chosen from those ready to vaccinate large numbers of people quickly to give a geographical spread covering as many people as possible,” the NHS said in a statement.

These centres are staffed by trained volunteers from St John Ambulance and the NHS Volunteer Responder scheme, as well as NHS staff.

The NHS said that it’s sending out over 600,000 letters to over-80s, inviting them to book an appointment for vaccination.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Jan. 4 that the government plans to vaccinate everyone in the four top priority groups with the first dose by mid-February.

The groups include care home residents and their carers, everyone over the age of 70, all frontline health and social care workers, and everyone who is clinically extremely vulnerable.

Three CCP virus vaccines have so far been approved in the UK: Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, approved by the UK’s medicines regulator on Dec. 2; Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, approved on Dec. 30; and most recently, the single-dose Moderna vaccine, approved on Friday. The rolling-out of the first two vaccines has already started.

“Today, I think I can confirm that we’ve done roughly 40 per cent of the 80-year-olds in this country already,” Johnson said, when he visited one of the centers on Monday.

“We’ve done about 23 per cent of the elderly residents of care homes,” he added.

NHS England said there are currently just under 1,000 vaccination sites across the country, and more GP-led and hospital services, as well as the first pharmacy-led pilot sites, are due to open this week, to bring the number up to around 1,200.

“Through our vaccine delivery plan around two million people have already received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccines and these new large scale vaccination centres will help us accelerate the rollout even further,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock said in a statement on the opening of the mass-vaccination centers.

He said the vaccines will save thousands of lives and help the UK to return to normal.