Red-faced Matt Hancock visited a GP surgery today to hail the Oxford vaccine rollout - but its delivery of jabs hadn’t arrived yet.
The Health Secretary said it was “great news” that the jab could be delivered to family doctors from today to hit a target of inoculating 14million by February 15.
But the Bloomsbury Surgery in Camden, north London, had not received its delivery of the new vaccine when he visited.
GP Ammara Hughes told Sky News: “We were expecting our first AstraZeneca 400 today, but we've had a pushback for 24 hours so we're now getting that delivery tomorrow."
She added: “It's just more frustrating than a concern, because we've got the capacity to vaccinate and if we had a regular supply, we do have the capacity to vaccinate three to four thousand patients a week.
"We have been running since the middle of December, and on our busiest days we can vaccinate 500 people easily.
"If we could get the AstraZeneca, then we could easily vaccinate 500 a day, which would ease the pressure on the health service.
“And we could get more and more people vaccinated quickly and hopefully get out of the pandemic."
It is thought the practice had not been due to give the Oxford jab from today, because it already had supplies of the Pfizer jab, but could still prove embarrassing to the top Tory.
Ministers have insisted they can ramp up from around 300,000 vaccines per week to 300,000 per day to meet Boris Johnson ’s target.
Speaking outside the surgery, Mr Hancock said the “rate-limiting step” was how fast the two jabs could be produced by the firms Pfizer and AstraZeneca.
It was not clear if he knew about the Oxford jab delay to that surgery at the time.
He told reporters: “The manufacturers are doing a brilliant job and they’re delivering to the schedule that’s agreed.
“But that schedule is the amount of vaccine that we have, and that’s what GPs will now be delivering.
“The good news is that from today the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine can be delivered by GP practices right across the country.
“That means we’ll be able to get more vaccine out to more people more quickly and get everybody who’s vulnerable to this disease the offer of a vaccine by the middle of next month”.
Boris Johnson has pledged to vaccinate the four top priority groups - including all over-70s, shielders, care home residents and NHS and care staff - by February 15.
There will be 775 GP-led centres and 207 hospital sites open by the end of this week, No10 said, plus seven ‘super’ centres next week.
The government is trying to speed up the approval process by which the MHRA regulator has to pass each batch before it goes out.
Public Health England is not currently taking ‘routine’ orders of the jab to hospitals on Sundays, but says it can step up and do so at any time.
It came as figures showed 311,372 people tested positive for Covid-19 in England in the week to December 30.
That was a rise of around 60,000 positive tests on the week before, despite the actual number of tests falling by 29%.
The privatised Test and Trace system reached 92.3% of people’s close contacts, a number that has been stable since the service started counting one person as representative of their entire household.
Test result waiting times decreased again after a sharp rise in early December.
It took 29 hours to get results from walk-in and drive-through testing sites in the week to December 30, down from between 32 and 42 hours the week before.
Satellite tests used in care homes took 54 hours to come back, but this was down from 69 hours the week before.
Home testing kits took 61 hours to come back, but this was also down from 74 the week before.
