COVID news – live: Coronavirus vaccine study reveals protection for pregnant women, as Germany’s lockdown easing plans threatened by soaring case numbers – Sky News

COVID news – live: Coronavirus vaccine study reveals protection for pregnant women, as Germany’s lockdown easing plans threatened by soaring case numbers – Sky News

Analysis: Good, bad, worse and even worse news for Hancock

By Jon Craig, chief
political correspondent

First the
good news. Matt Hancock will be celebrating the milestone of 25 million people
receiving their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine when he hosts the latest
Downing Street coronavirus news conference.

It’s an
extraordinary feat, he claims, coming exactly 100 days after Margaret Keenan
received the first authorised jab in the whole world. It has been a national
mission, he’s likely to say, and one of the biggest logistical exercises since
the war.

The bad
news, however, is that according to Dominic Cummings, the health secretary has
no right to be claiming any of the credit for the vaccines success and it has
been achieved in spite of his department and not because of it.

A “smoking
ruin” was Mr Cummings’ damning verdict on Mr Hancock’s department in explosive
evidence to a committee of MPs earlier. He claimed the government’s fight to
tackle the pandemic were held up by Whitehall bureaucracy.

But the bad
news gets worse. The European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is
threatening to block jab exports to the UK and other countries with high
vaccination rates.

And now, in
a potentially major blow to the UK’s vaccines roll-out, minutes before the news
conference gets under way, comes even worse news. It has emerged that NHS
England is now warning of a significant reduction in vaccine supplies from the
week commencing 29 March.

So big
problems ahead on the vaccines programme. And a tough news conference for Mr
Hancock just got a whole lot tougher.

Published at Wed, 17 Mar 2021 06:56:15 +0000