Scotland will receive over one million doses of a new covid vaccine that has arrived north of the order.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the Moderna jab arrived safely in Scotland yesterday, but noted that it was already part of the Government’s existing projections.
The UK has made huge progress in vaccinating the population due to the Pfizer and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines.
At her briefing today, Sturgeon said “virtually all over 60 year olds” had now received their first dose.
She also provided an update on the third vaccine: “I can confirm...that the first batch of the Moderna vaccine arrived in Scotland safely yesterday. A total of 17 million doses of this vaccine have been ordered for the UK, and of that total Scotland will receive well over a million doses.”
She said the vaccine would arrive over a period of months, and that the doses are “already factored in” to forward projections.
Sturgeon added: “The fact that we now have three vaccines in use is clearly very welcome and it does give us greater security of supply which is welcome.”
The First Minister said 2,577,816 people have received the first dose of a Covid-19 vaccination and 463,780 have received their second dose.
The First Minister warned Scots that there is still a risk of Covid-19 spikes as are being seen in other countries, despite relatively low numbers north of the border.
She told the briefing: “In total, cases have now fallen by 80% since early January when of course they were at a particularly high level, the number of deaths has fallen even more sharply than that and as you can see from the numbers I reported earlier the number of people in hospital and intensive care is reducing.”
But she added: “Covid is down in Scotland, you can see that from the figures, but as we can still see here and more starkly in more parts of the world, Covid is not out.
“It is a virus that is very much still with us.
“Here in Scotland we are still seeing hundreds of people every day testing positive for it and almost all of the new cases that we are seeing reported now in Scotland are of the new variant that emerged just before Christmas and as we know that variant is more infectious than the variants we were dealing with earlier this year.”
