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These show an accelerating trend in COVID cases in the week before Christmas, with the number of hospital admissions rising to 3,203 from 2,622 the previous week and the number of new cases up to 7,164 from 5227 the previous week – a rise of 36%. The biggest rises have been in London and south-east England
The numbers are still only a fraction of those from when the pandemic was in full swing, but they suggest an upward trend for the virus this winter.
The government’s autumn COVID vaccination programme, aimed at the elderly and vulnerable, has applied to 68. 8% of eligible people, with around a third appearing to have not been vaccinated.
The national online vaccination programme was shut down through the government in December, but some GPs and local pharmacies will offer vaccines to eligible people until 31 January.
Regular testing is not being conducted in hospital cancer and transplant wards which contain vulnerable immunocompromised patients.
Oversight has been reduced and will be reduced in the next fiscal year due to the funding update.
Long-term COVID clinics are funded through the NHS budget and will be affected by this upgrade and investment in vaccines will also remain separate from the core budget.
This monetary year will be the last year that ministers will fund the UKHSA to fight COVID with a separate budget. Around £430 million has been set aside until April. After that, the cash will come from the UKHSA’s core budget that it receives from the Department of Health and Social Care. The UKHSA said it was in negotiations on the matter, but that it would only be a fraction of this year’s budget.
The drastic spending relief that lies ahead calls for the government’s “Living with COVID” strategy.
Sir John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford and a former member of the government’s vaccine task force, warned of “an surely dramatic return to what existed before the pandemic” and that “our clinical trial environment is very, very worse than it has ever been in my memory as a man. “
Kate Bingham, who praised her work leading the government’s COVID vaccine task force, also warned that the UK does not bring clinical and advertising expertise to the government and does not seek to build mass antibody production capacity in the UK. He also questioned why the Novavax vaccine, which uses a protein subunit like many other vaccines, is not available in the UK.
The UKHSA said it was implementing the Living with COVID policy and that the UK had sufficient sources of COVID-19 vaccines for booster campaigns planned for this year, maintaining a contingency inventory in case vaccination was needed beyond those campaigns.
A total of 34. 4 million vaccines were stored in warehouses at the end of October, but some of those vaccines expire in April. A Whitehall report said in May 2022 that those doses would be phased out because “those doses have no feasible choice use. “
It is possible that the UKHSA will simply say how many doses will be destroyed.
He said he was committed to maintaining resilience in the face of a significant resurgence of COVID-19 or new variants, and to protecting the NHS from unsustainable pressure. This includes the option to reintroduce vaccination (sudden response) for the most vulnerable, if necessary.
The government also sold a new vaccine production and study facility worth £200 million, ahead of completion, in Oxfordshire to US pharmaceutical company Catalent in April 2022. The center was established as a non-profit enterprise with the purpose of combining studies and vaccine production in one location.
The new owners, who manufacture medicines around the world in addition to China, said: “We remain excited about the strategic opportunities at the Harwell site and are exploring the more productive features that can be had for on-site biologics production, adding vaccines. “
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