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The Scottish Government's vaccine plan had to be deleted after revealing confidential information that could have risked how many doses the UK gets from suppliers


By Scott Maclennan

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Vaccinations are rolling out across the north from GP practices.
Vaccinations are rolling out across the north from GP practices.

A major blunder by the Scottish Government could have risked the number of doses of Covid vaccines supplies to the country.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon's government was left red-faced after revealing apparently confidential information.

Within hours it was forced to remove its own Covid vaccination plan after it was published when the UK government raised serious concerns about its contents.

It is the second such error from the Scottish Government in two days. Health secretary Jeane Freeman revealed the location where vaccines were being stored despite fears for their security.

A UK government source told the Press Association that: "The reason we didn't want to publish these figures was because everyone in the world wants these vaccines, and if other countries see how much we are getting they are likely to put pressure on the drug firms to give them some of our allocation."

Scottish Conservative health spokesman, Highland MSP Donald Cameron, said: “This is the second serious error by SNP ministers in the space of 24 hours.

“Yesterday, the health secretary revealed a secret location that Scottish Government officials wanted to keep confidential. Now, they’ve had to pull a whole vaccination plan out of sheer incompetence.

“These mistakes potentially endanger supplies and risk impacting the rollout of the vaccine.

“We all want the delivery of the vaccine to succeed but these entirely avoidable mistakes suggest the SNP are running about like headless chickens behind the scenes.

“We need to see a blunder-free vaccine plan from the SNP Government as soon as possible.”

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon responded to the claims at today’s briefing after questions from reporters.

She said: “We posted the vaccine deployment plan yesterday which has been temporarily taken off the website after the UK government raised concerns about the level of information we included in that on the projected supply of vaccine.

“We were seeking to be – and I think it is important to be – very transparent around all aspects of this to be clear on the targets we are setting for the numbers of people we are vaccinating and then to give people as much assurance as we can, subject to all the caveats that we still have to put in place about the supply flows that we had expecting.

“But the UK government has some commercial confidentiality concerns about that, so we're having a discussion with them about what can be published.

“But the information in that plan about the targets that we are setting, starting with the JCVI at clinical priority list and then working on to the wider population and that stands as it was published yesterday.

“It is not our aspiration to vaccinate the whole population it is our intention to vaccinate the whole adult population and that is one of the things, not the only thing, that makes this vaccination program such a massive logistical challenge.

“Because it's not like flu where we, every year, do the clinically prioritized groups – this is a whole population, although as vaccines developed we may be able to do younger people in the future.”


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