Black Country and Staffordshire councils in race to get ready for mass Covid vaccine delivery
Buildings are being earmarked to host a mass vaccination against coronavirus.
The NHS has tasked councils in the Black Country and Staffordshire with identifying centres where people can be vaccinated.
Pharmacies and GPs surgeries are being lined up, and it understood that due to the huge scale of the operation public buildings will also be used.
Scientists are in a race to get a Covid vaccine ready before Christmas, with Ministers believing it is the only way to get Britain out of its current cycle of lockdown and other restrictions on personal freedoms.
Clive Wright, the Covid regional convener for the West Midlands, said the NHS was "in the early stages of planning" for vaccine delivery.
Councillor Ian Brookfield, the leader of Wolverhampton Council, said: "All of the local authorities have been told to plan for vaccination, both in terms of getting people ready to administer it as well as locations.
"We are going to need a lot of people to administer the vaccine.
"Pharmacies and doctors' surgeries will be used but they won't be enough for such a large scale operation."
Andrew Pollard, trial chief investigator for the Oxford vaccine, said there was a "small chance" that a vaccine would be ready to roll out to the public this year.
Demand
Before that happens it will be tested on tens of thousands of people.
The race for a vaccine has become more pressing due to the increased strain on hospitals, with Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital cancelling all non-emergency procedures after a spike in the number of Covid patients.
David Loughton, the CEO at Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, has previously vowed not to cancel non-Covid procedures and last week opened up a new coronavirus ward at New Cross Hospital to meet demand.
He said there was now a "real problem" with a bed shortage in intensive care, and warned that if Covid patient numbers continued to rise sharply then cancelling heart and cancer surgery would be "the only fall back position".
He said that on November 5, New Cross had "the worst waiting time for ambulances" he had seen in 16 years, with one stranded outside for four hours.
