A LEADING doctor in the pharmacy industry has said 1.3million vaccines could be delivered if the Government acts fast and enrols more pharmacists.

Dr Mahendra Patel, who works with number of national and local organisations including the English Pharmacy Board, said pharmacists are the key to reaching the target of delivering 14 million vaccines by February.

Earlier today Nadhim Zahawi MP, Minister for COVID Vaccine Deployment, told Radio 4: "We will make sure that community pharmacies and the independent sector are involved and that we deliver what I think is a credible plan that the NHS has put together to hit that target of 13 million vaccinations ... by mid-February."

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The minister did not set out further details about when this will take place.

High street pharmacy Boots is one of several businesses that have offered their facilities to the vaccine programme while vaccination centres are also being set up around the country.

Boots will set up three vaccination sites initially in Halifax, Huddersfield and Gloucester but many professionals feel the Government is not using all of the resources readily available.

Dr Patel described the vaccine roll-out as a "race against time".

“If you look at that target the Government have set out, that’s about 300,000 per day to get to that," the University of Bradford professor said.

“There’s over 11,000 community pharmacists in the UK and if each of them can do 20 vaccines per day that’s 1.3million vaccines per week. That’s the extra number of vaccines that people could be having.

"The other thing is having the community pharmacists in the highstreets. At the moment we’ve got vaccination centres and this is where the inequalities continue to widen because not everybody is able to access and get to these centres. Can you imagine the elderly people trying to get to these places as well?

“We’ve got to make use of these 11,000 local community pharmacists which are the real soldiers on the ground. We have provided it with the flu vaccines. We’ve been giving thousands of flu vaccines for decades without a problem.

"I’m worried about the health inequalities if we don’t use these facilities. 90 per cent of the population are within walking distance with a local community pharmacy.

“We have the training, the knowledge and the skills and we have an army of pharmacists that are absolutely dead keen and support the Government in trying to tackle this pandemic. Let’s use these soldiers on the ground.

“By the time the Government wakes up are we going to then continue to have more people suffering? This is now about a race against time and trying to get this virus out of the way and pharmacists can help beat the challenges in that race and help the Government reach this targets.

“Why does the pharmacy profession have to keep banging on the door and pushing that door down? Why does it have to be seen as an add on when people’s lives are being lost?”