Rupert Murdoch, health tourist, has got his jab on the NHS just as his top Fox News man, Tucker Carlson, is sowing doubt around the coronavirus vaccines.

What a time to be alive.

Does it work on this new strain?

No reason to think it won't. There are already several strains, 9 I think, the original L strain is pretty much extinct now.

Can't help but think that it's going to take far longer to vaccinate than is being put about by the government. All this "back to some sort of normality by Easter" stuff is very optimistic indeed. We've heard this sort of thing before.

The Oxford/AZ vaccine should be approved very soon - my guess is by end of month. There are huge stocks of this and it's really easy to transport and store, and will be almost immediately ready for mass roll out. Also, you don't have to be somewhere that can deal with massive allergic reactions when they give you it. I strongly suspect that the military have been planning for a mass vaccination program and are being (or have been trained already) to give it.

If I was to guess at the conversations going on between scientists and government they might be along the lines of imposing a severe shutdown (Tier 4) because mass vaccine roll out is very close. It would make sense to take a short term hit on freedoms etc. to cut cases, to mitigate that the vaccine roll out should open things up considerably by Easter.

UK population is currently around 66 million. Even if we vaccinated a million a week it would take 66 weeks to vaccinate everyone.

Anyone know what the total figure was in the first week of vaccinations? About 138k. It would take just over 9 years to vaccinate everyone at that rate. You've got to think they'll get up to some decent speed, but all this talk of it being over by Easter is pie in the sky stuff. Maybe Easter 2023.

Don't we all need two doses - so does that double the time needed?

Two doses are required, about 4 weeks apart, I think. There's no way everyone will be getting them by Easter 2021.

Was there ever any plans for everybody to get vaccine ?
I was under the impression they weren't bothering with under 16s(don't think its even licensed for them),you would also need to remove people that don't want it ?
Sure i read the nine priority groups represent about 25% of population,but these nine groups account for over 90% of the deaths.
So i would think we need to get approx 16m - 17m vaccinated before we can get back to some normality.

Have you tried of the vaccine calculator?

[urlhttps://www.omnicalculator.com/health/vaccine-queue-uk[/url

Next spring for me

Some time between June and September, for me.

I wouldn't take that as gospel. Lots of variables to factor in and I doubt that calculator has done all that.