Wembley Stadium and Chelsea to host mass vaccination centres as booster drive in London ramps up before Christmas

Ross Lydall @RossLydall15 December 2021

Wembley Stadium will be turned into a mass vaccination clinic on Sunday as efforts to get Londoners boosted before Christmas are increased.

The national football stadium will host a pop-up clinic from 10am to 6pm, with first and second doses – including for children accompanied by an adult - available in addition to boosters.

Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge ground will become a mass vaccination centre on Saturday. Health chiefs plan to offer up to 10,000 jabs at each venue.

Appointments can be booked on the Eventbrite website and walk-ins will also be accepted. Appointments for Wembley can be booked here and for Chelsea here.

In addition, Greenwich council is hosting a Vaccination at the Valley event at Charlton FC’s ground on Saturday and Sunday.

A total of 63,383 boosters were given in London on Monday, 70 per cent more than the previous Monday, as the rush to get protected intensified.

On Wednesday morning there were long queues at the walk-in vaccination at Westfield shopping centre in Stratford and elsewhere across the capital.

PA

It came as a leading doctor warned that 11.5m people will be unable to book a booster by the end of December, despite the Government target.

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chairman of the British Medical Association’s council, said this was due to the number of people yet to receive a first jab plus those whose second jab was less than three months ago – preventing them from booking a booster appointment before the end of the year.

Dr Nagpaul told the All Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus: “Even if we were to vaccinate every single eligible adult, there are still 11.5m adults who won’t be part of the booster programme because they have either been unvaccinated, only had one vaccine or the second vaccine has been less than three months.

“The Government needs to explain to the public that even if we were to succeed by December 31, next year is still going to have millions of unvaccinated or unprotected members of the population.

Covid booster jab scramble as Omicron variant surges

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“If we are to tackle this, you are going to have to have some other restrictions or other ways of reducing the virus – a “vaccine plus” strategy, but all we are hearing about is the booster programme.”

On Tuesday the Standard revealed that thousands more people will also be unable to book a booster due to contracting covid. NHS regulations require a 28-day period between infection and getting the booster.

There have been more than 168,000 covid cases diagnosed in the capital in the last 28 days, and almost 1.3m across the UK.

Last week the UK  Health Security Agency revealed that two doses were not enough to stop people becoming unwell from Omicron. A third booster prevents around 75 per cent of people getting any symptoms.

Professor Stephen Reicher, a member of the SPI-B sub-group of SAGE, said there was a need to get the infection rate down to prevent it hindering the booster roll-out.

He warned that people who had a booster would still have to wait up to two weeks from getting their third jab to being fully protected against Omicron.

“If we are to do nothing now… the number of cases will be catastrophically high,” he said. “If you do socialise now, you won’t be able to socialise at Christmas.”

The UK Health Security Agency said that 91 per cent of Britons had had their first dose by yesterday, 87 per cent two doses and 45 per cent a booster.

A total of 2,086 Omicron cases had been confirmed in London by yesterday, up 51 on the previous day, plus an additional 5,990 suspected cases where there had been a “S gene drop out”, up 1,627 on Monday.

However the true number of Omicron cases is thought to be far higher, with the variant accounting for more than half of all infections in the capital.

Vaccination sites in north central London (Camden, Islington, Haringey, Barnet and Enfield) can be found here.

Vaccination sites in north-east London can be found here. This includes Waltham Forest, Hackney, City of London, Tower Hamlets, Redbridge, Havering, Newham and Barking and Dagenham.

Vaccination sites and pop-up clinics in south-east London can be found here. These include Bexley, Bromley, Greenwich, Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham.

Vaccination sites in north-west London (Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham, Brent, Ealing, Harrow, Hillingdon, Hounslow) , including a Tesco in Feltham and a golf club in Harrow, can be found here.

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