As more and more people are desperate to find out when they might be offered a vaccination against CoVID, a number of online calculators are springing up to provide an estimate. Andy Pye, who is a Type 2 diabetic, has a personal interest.
Of course, all of this may change, depending on production rates of the various options, when they are approved for use, and any change in priority.
The available vaccines are in various stages of testing and approval. The UK government did not join the EU vaccine scheme and approved the Pfizer vaccine earlier, ordering 40 million doses. According to the European Commission, the EU has reached agreements with six pharmaceutical companies to purchase hundreds of millions of vaccines, once they pass clinical trials.
Above Left: Estimates from the BBC of the various doses of vaccine ordered by the UK. Above Right: This graph from The Sun shows how at the current vaccination speed, the UK will fail to protect even the most vulnerable people by 2022
The Vaccine Queue Calculator is based on the Government’s vaccine priority list which starts with care home residents and moves through various groups including those aged 80 and over and the clinically extremely vulnerable. It allows people to input their age and other basic health details to calculate their place in the queue. The tool assumes there will be a vaccination rate of 1,000,000 a week and an uptake of 70.6%. It is therefore able to predict a date range for when it is most likely a user will be vaccinated.
The calculator suggests it will take just over a year to vaccinate everyone. It is important everyone remains patient. Speaking in the House of Lords, health minister Lord Bethell said it would take until at least the spring before even all high-risk groups had been offered a jab. Mass vaccination for the general population is not expected to get under way until the summer and full ‘herd immunity’ may not be achieved until 2022.
It’s all changing day by day! Against scientific and pharmaceutical experts’ advice, the UK is now contemplating fiddling around with the manufacturers’ recommended dosing procedure, in order to vaccinate more people, but with only the first shot. If this goes ahead, it would have a profound positive effect on the waiting time, at the expense of a possible negative effect on the level of immunity afforded. In turn, this would affect the results of the Vaccine Queue Calculator. Be sure to check it regularly, and we will also update this article as appropriate to provide the latest information
Further reading
Dr Anthony Fauci says US will not delay second doses of Covid vaccine
Vaccine chaos as UK reaches the eye of the covid storm
Addressing the Scottish Parliament, Professor Wei Shen Lim, of the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said: “Around 70% to 80% of the population need to be immunised in order for the UK to reach herd immunity.”
Recently, it has been suggested by Tony Blair and others that it might be better to give twice as many people one vaccination, rather than half as many two. The Pfizer vaccine is reported to give around 95 per cent immunity, whereas only one jab gives 52 per cent. Would you prefer to be vaccinated earlier and have 52 per cent immunity, or wait longer and have 95 per cent?
In my case, my deadline is slipping slightly. In early December, the calculator said this:
Given a vaccination rate of 1,000,000 a week and an uptake of 70.6%, you should expect to receive your vaccine between 25/02/2021 and 14/03/2021.
A week later, it said this…
Given a vaccination rate of 1,000,000 a week and an uptake of 70.6%, you should expect to receive your vaccine between 02/03/2021 and 19/03/2021.
Now (4 January 2021), it says this:
Given a vaccination rate of 1,000,000 a week and an uptake of 70.6%, you should expect to receive your two doses of vaccine and be fully protected by between 23/05/2021 and 25/06/2021.
