Tony Blair urges Government to speed up Covid vaccinations to avoid ‘cat and mouse game’ with new variants

Tony Blair has urged the Government to speed up its vaccination scheme as he warned of a “cat and mouse game” with new variants of coronavirus.

The former Labour prime minister predicted that it will be difficult for people to have a “normal life” in the future unless they can “prove” their vaccination status.  

He told Good Morning Britain: “What we are learning about this disease – and I’m afraid this is going to be a big big problem for us in the future – is that it is a bit of a cat and mouse game.  

“You’ve got the risk the longer you delay this [vaccine rollout] that you get another variation of the disease which is more difficult for us to deal with.  

“So you’ve got the one that most people think of as developed here but it was actually just discovered here but you’ve got the one coming out of South Africa which is much more worrying.

“And you could have further mutations of the disease. So the quicker you do this vaccination programme the better it is – not just to get us back to normal – but also to fight the disease.”

It comes as the Tony Blair Institute published a paper on Wednesday setting out how the Government could scale up the delivery of the coronavirus vaccine.  

The paper says the Government should introduce “vaccination stations” across the UK using polling stations as a blueprint.  

It also suggests considering drive-through vaccination sites, pop-up locations and mobile vaccination units as well as using all GP surgeries and every pharmacy.  

Mr Blair said he would get the jab and added: “I think you will get to the stage where it’s going very hard for people to do a lot of normal life unless they can prove their vaccination status. 

"I think you’ll find a situation where countries say to you ‘you’re not coming in here unless we see whether you’ve either been vaccinated, you’ve had the disease and got antibodies or you’ve had a recent high-quality test’.

“People have got to understand vaccination is going to be in the end your route to liberty.”

The New Labour PM suggested if the Government “throw absolutely everything” at the vaccination scheme that, by the last week of March, half the population could be vaccinated.

He added: “We reckon you could get up to three million a week by the end of January, four million a week by the end of February, five million a week in March and then you’ve got to use every single available bit of capacity in order to make sure these vaccines are used. That means I think altering completely the present plan that we have...we should be thinking about this on a completely different scale now.”

He added: “You’ve occupational health workers – several thousand of those – they are perfectly qualified to give what is essentially a flu jab.”

The Government’s vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi today insisted that more than two million jabs a week could be delivered to reach the target of more than 13 million people most at risk from Covid by mid-February.

He told Sky News: “It’s a big target, and I think the Prime Minister is right to set challenging targets.  

“We need to get on with this and do it as quickly but as safely as possible, which is why I commend the NHS for the plan that they put in place.”

It comes as an estimated 1.1m people in England - the equivalent of one in 50 – had Covid between December 27 and January 2, according to the Office for National Statistics. 

A Government spokesperson said: “Over 1.3 million people, including almost a quarter of people aged over 80 in England, have been vaccinated and the NHS has a clear delivery plan to rollout the biggest vaccination campaign this country has ever seen.

“This rollout is committed to saving the most lives possible and it is being accelerated every single day and, as the Prime Minister outlined, vaccinations will be taking place at over 1,000 stations by the end of this week and seven vaccine centres from next week.”