FIRST Minister Nicola Sturgeon will deliver a pre-recorded address to the nation tonight.
The First Minister’s broadcast will come at 7pm on BBC One Scotland, after she provides an update on the Omicron situation in Scotland to the Scottish Parliament.
The BBC announced that the First Minister would make her appearance after it was confirmed that Labour leader Keir Starmer would address the UK yesterday evening.
The First Minister is expected to use her appearance to discuss the quick-spreading variant – and plead with Scots to limit their household contacts.
Speaking yesterday, Sturgeon said that booster jabs to all Scots aged 18 and above by the end of this year will be a “monumental challenge”.
With the vaccination programme being accelerated in a bid to combat the new Omicron variant of the virus, the First Minister said she did not underestimate the scale of the challenge. But as she stressed vaccination was the “best line of defence” against Omicron, Sturgeon said: “We’ve got to bust a gut to get this programme done as quickly as possible.”
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To meet the ambition of offering all eligible adults a booster dose of vaccine by the end of December means that more than 70,000 Scots a day will need to get jagged, it has been estimated.
Sturgeon, who has previously warned Omicron could lead to a “tsunami” of new infections, said that government officials were currently working with local health boards to speed up the programme. The First Minister said they were considering “all of the possible options to build capacity in a system that is already operating at a very fast pace”.
This will be done by a combination of bringing in additional staff to give the injections, increasing the number of appointments at vaccine centres and looking at opening up new centres.
Sturgeon said: “We are currently the most-vaccinated part of the UK, including through boosters, but we do want to speed that up because Omicron is running very fast.”
“We also know from some of the early evidence in terms of being infected with Omicron one or two doses is not sufficient ... so it’s really, really important we get booster jags as quickly as possible.
“Booster jags are our best defence, so we’ve got to bust a gut to get this programme done as quickly as possible and we are challenging ourselves to do that at pace.
But she stated: “I don’t underestimate any of this, this is a monumental challenge.”
Sturgeon said if people had difficulty making an appointment they should try again the next day “because we are getting more appointments into the system, literally every day”.
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