Dr Fiona Head, acting medical director at the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Clinical Commissioning Group, which is coordinating the local effort, said Peterborough City Hospital and Stanground Surgery have made good progress with vaccinating the most vulnerable residents, with more GP surgeries applying to become approved sites.
Dr Head also revealed that a place in Peterborough will be chosen as a large vaccination site, with a decision on the approved premises to be made nationally.
She told the Peterborough Telegraph: “Peterborough City Hospital has been very successful in doing over-80s and quite a few care home staff have been there as well which is fantastic as they are our top two priority cohorts.
“We’ve got Stanground Surgery (doing vaccines) while primary care networks across Peterborough have expressed an interest in becoming part of the vaccine programme and we’re signing up as many of those as possible over the next couple of weeks.”
Asked if the programme, which is being run nationally, has been going smoothly, Dr Head replied: “Absolutely. The hospital and primary care colleagues have been working incredibly hard and it’s going well.”
There are approximately one million residents in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, with around 120,000 said to be in the highest priority groups for the vaccine (those aged 80 or above or working in healthcare or social care settings).
Dr Head said figures for the roll-out of the vaccine across the county have not been revealed by national bodies, meaning the CCG is not aware of how many people have received the jab.
Despite this, she is confident anyone registered with a GP - even if they live in Peterborough but are registered with a practice in another county - will be contacted about receiving a vaccine when they are eligible to receive one.
And she is urging people to take up that offer, with the Pfizer vaccine currently being administered locally and the Oxford vaccine expected to arrive in the near future.
Dr Head said: “We’re giving the Pfizer to anybody unless they have a specific allergy to any of the ingredients.
“I’m not aware of anything (with side effects) above what we’d expect from the product characteristics.
“That’s good for confidence, but we have to be realistic. If we’re giving millions and millions of doses, which we will be, at some point by the nature of chance somebody will have a bad reaction which may or may not be related to the jab itself.
“Even paracetamol has side effects.”
Dr Head re-iterated pleas from other professionals for people to get a vaccine when they can, although she warned that this would not mean an end to social distancing.
“We know this is an effective vaccine. Vaccination really is our way out of this,” she added.
“But it’s not the case as soon as you’re vaccinated you can ignore social distancing.
“They are amazing products, they are safe, but because they’ve been developed so quickly what we don’t know yet is whether they stop transmission of the virus in asymptomatic people.
“We know they cut down the risk of getting Covid badly, but we don’t know if you are vaccinated whether you can still pick the disease up and pass it to someone else.
“Until we have the evidence for it we’re not going to be let up because we may still be at risk of passing on the infection which we don’t know about.
“But the more of us that get vaccinated the faster we will get out of restrictions.”
