Jab interval slashed to six weeks so young people can go on summer holidays abroad: Vaccine centres quietly bend the rules as they cut gap from the official two months
Young people can now get their second jab just six weeks after the first to allow them to go abroad on summer holiday, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Vaccine centres are quietly bending the rules and cutting the gap from the official two months.
A Minister told this newspaper that the centres had been encouraged to be ‘more reasonable’ when the public asked to shorten the gap between vaccines in an attempt to boost take-up for the young.
Lucinda Benton-Hawthorn, 18, gets her first jab at Birmingham’s Nightingale Club. Young people can now get their second jab just six weeks after the first to allow them to go abroad on summer holiday
Being double-jabbed means not having to quarantine on return from amber list countries.
One pharmacy in London last week put up a notice saying that anyone who had their jab as recently as the last week of June – a six-week gap – was eligible.
And a surgery in Essex last week invited anyone who had the jab five weeks ago or more to turn up to use up doses before they expired.
Other jab centres told the MoS that they would allow a six-week gap, or even shorter, if someone had an email from their GP saying they were about to go on holiday and needed the second jab sooner.
A GP said there were three main reasons to speed up a second dose – to undergo chemotherapy, have an operation or to go on holiday.
The Minister said: ‘GPs will bend over backwards for young people to get the jab. So if an 18-year-old comes and says, I booked a holiday to France, I won’t have the same experience if I’m not double-jabbed, they will try and help them out.’ It comes as:
While some have benefited from the more flexible approach to a second jab, others have criticised the lack of transparency because some centres are turning away people who have not waited eight weeks. ‘It’s a lottery,’ said a source.
The Minister said that the chance to take foreign holidays was the best way to encourage young people to get vaccinated.
The Government was trying to reach a point where in every group of friends there was only one odd one out who hadn’t been jabbed, so they succumbed to ‘peer pressure’, the Minister added.
The Health Secretary is the latest senior figure to criticise the cost of PCR tests. Mr Javid, writing to the CMA, said: ‘For too many people the cost of PCR testing can act as a barrier, especially for families who want to travel together. We have all experienced enormous disruption to our lives over this pandemic but it is not right if some families experience yet further disruption unnecessarily because of potentially unfair practices in the market for private travel tests.
‘It is important that the sensible measures we have introduced at the borders are fair and transparent and don’t involve unnecessary costs or low-quality provision to people who have made so many sacrifices.’