Plan announced as British Medical Association urges review of the gap between vaccine doses
The Francis Crick Institute has teamed up with University College London Hospitals to create a large-scale Covid-19 vaccination centre at its premises.
The centre will prioritise vaccinations for people over the age of 80, at-risk individuals in priority groups and frontline healthcare staff as part of the NHS vaccination programme.
Crick said it will have the capacity to vaccinate up to 1,000 people a day, seven days a week. The centre will be overseen by UCLH and staffed by Crick clinician scientists, as well as additional volunteers from the Crick and its partners.
More than 300 researchers and other staff have volunteered to help with the programme, including a number of scientists who are medically trained.
“Getting the UK population vaccinated is a major task and it is part of the Crick’s civic duty to do all it can to help,” said the Francis Crick Institute director Paul Nurse.
“These are the first steps towards allowing the UK to become normal again—getting the economy going, and crucially, protecting the vulnerable. I am grateful to everyone at the institute who is helping to make this possible.”
The centre is just one aspect of the Crick’s response to the Covid-19 crisis. Since April, staff at the institute have been running Covid-19 testing for local healthcare staff and processing thousands of samples a week.
Dosing debate
The announcement comes after senior doctors at the British Medical Association (BMA) called for an urgent review of the government’s decision to extend the gap between Pfizer vaccine doses from three to 12 weeks, saying it was “difficult to justify” and asking for government to follow the evidence.
The original clinical trial data did not look at effectiveness of the first dose after such a long delay.
“We should not be extrapolating data when we don’t have it,” Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the BMA, told the BBC on 24 January.
Responding to the concerns on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme on 25 January, Adam Finn, a professor of paediatrics and a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said Public Health England had a “very clear plan for evaluation” of the delay.
He added: “We’re involved here in Bristol in doing some of those studies. We’re expecting to see results in the very near future so that will either confirm or tell us that we need to adjust the strategy from what we are currently doing.”
Asked when scientists would know more, Finn said he anticipated robust statistical analysis by the end of this week or by the following week.