WALES was legally obliged to hold on to doses of the Pfizer vaccine, the chief executive of NHS Wales has said.

Dr Andrew Goodall said that the health service in Wales had been legally obliged to hold onto all supplies of the Pfizer vaccine to give the second dose within the then three-week requirement.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the country was still on target to vaccinate the four priority groups by mid-February.

“The access to the Pfizer vaccine has been the same across the UK, particularly with the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency guidance which actually changed around the second dose on January 4,” he said.

“It was in line with the legal advice and the MHRA handling arrangements.

“The second dose needed to be retained up until the point that we were authorised to proceed with all the residual numbers of those vaccines, and that was a consistent standard that was in place for the whole of the UK.

“The vaccination activity has been increasing at pace and scale.

“We have a target, as with the rest of the UK to ensure that we’re able to make the first four cohorts by mid-February, and at the moment we expect that our activity profiles will allow us to ensure that those targets are met by mid-February.”

READ MORE:

Earlier this morning, first minister Mark Drakeford told the programme that Wales’s supply of the Pfizer vaccine had to last until February and therefore was not being used all at once.

Mr Drakeford said: “There will be no point, and certainly it will be logistically very damaging to try to use all of that in the first week and then to have all our vaccinators standing around with nothing to do for another month.

“The sensible thing to do is to use the vaccine you’ve got over the period that you’ve got it for so that your system can absorb it, they can go on working, that you don’t have people standing around with nothing to do.

“We will vaccinate all four priority groups by the middle of February, alongside everywhere else in the UK.”