(Credit: Chelwest NHS/Commons)

Hamed Chapman

Doubts remained about lifting the final stage of lockdown in England, despite, at the time of going to press, the Government boasting that the vaccine uptake exceeding 40 million in the UK, with numbers also having tripled among ethnic minorities.

As far back as June 4, Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) warned that a rapid surge in the number of Covid-19 cases was being witnessed in England with figures from Public Health England showing the Indian (Delta) variant was spread widely across the country.

Earlier the Medical Director of Primary Care for NHS England revealed that the uptake of vaccines among all ethnic minority groups had tripled in the last few months, outpacing the national average.

“Take-up among people from the Pakistani background is more than four times higher than it was in February, and a five-fold increase in people taking up the vaccine from a Bangladeshi background,” Dr Nikita Kanani said.

Yet in Bolton, where there had been a spike with the number of diagnosed cases reaching over 30,000, local Labour MP, Yasmin Qureshi, criticised the Government’s handling of the pandemic crisis as an “abject failure.”

“Health Secretary Matt Hancock recently shifted the terms of the debate away from the Government’s failings to ‘vaccine hesitancy.’ I was absolutely incensed that he tried to paint my constituents as anti-vaxxers in Bolton,” she said.

At the root of the latest surge in cases was the original placing of Pakistan and Bangladesh on the Government’s travel red list instead of

India, which was at the epicentre of the dominant Delta strain. “As things stand, it is very difficult to justify progressing with the last stage of the roadmap, scheduled for June 21, a point should be made now to modify current false hopes,” Sage said in a statement on June 4.

In contradictory messages, when announcing that over 40 million people in the UK had received their first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said it was “an astonishing achievement”. And that in all corners of the UK, people are “rolling up their sleeves when their time comes.”

Despite the threat of a third wave, comparative statistics show that behind Israel, the UK has the highest rate of people vaccinated in the world numbering 60 per cent, including 42.5 per cent having both jabs and a further 17.7 per cent having one so far.