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Hundreds of students turned away from Covid vaccination centre after doses run out during four-hour blitz
HUNDREDS of students were turned away from a Covid vaccination centre after doses ran out.
The jabs ran out after just two hours meaning the planned four hour blitz at University College London’s walk-in clinic in Camden had to be brought to a halt.
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Some students camped out from 5am hours to get a first Covid vaccine so they can go out partying in nightclubs when lockdown lifts.
There were also queues at Belmont Health Centre in in Harrow, North West London, which was is handing out Pfizer jabs to walk-ins.
And keen over-18s who live in the area and are still waiting for a first vaccine have been lining the streets to get protected.
Pictures show the teens forming a huge queue around the health centre - including through the car park and along the street.
UCL is the first uni to advertise a walk-in vaccine and it’s hoped this will become a more regular means of administering jabs to young people.
The clinic, run by NHS Camden, had organised the event as a walk-in vaccination session for students who were not registered with a GP.
Ammara Hughes, the GP in charge of managing the programme, said she had not anticipated the scale of demand.
“Our initial push was to get the student population from around here who aren’t registered with a GP, because we had no way of contacting them”,
“So that’s what we asked, we worked with our local universities to say, 'We’ll run a walk-in clinic for that group’. And then all of a sudden, everybody found out about the vaccine.
“Obviously, we have a limit as to how many appointments we can give them in one day. Our priority was people who did not already have a GP, so, people who we wouldn't be able to contact with an invite for a vaccine.
“I think we’ve vaccinated about 600, 700 people today. We’d left about 450 for walk-ins, because what the university had initially told us, we might get a couple of hundred. And all of a sudden we had a fair few thousand people.”
Some of those queuing were hoping to get the vaccine ahead of "Freedom Day" on June 21 when lockdown lifts and clubs re-open.
Jamie Lesser, 20, said: "If all plans go ahead, clubs are going to open in three weeks’ time and we both have plans to go out.”
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The student said he plans to party for "about five days in a row" when nightclubs re-open to make up for the last year.
His pal Daniel Simmons said he thought he would "jump on it" when he saw the chance to get a vaccine, adding: "I want to get it as soon as possible really.”
Marketing executive Olga Milevska, 27, and friend Konstantin Germer, also 27, are hoping to go travelling in the summer when they get the vaccine.
Olga said: "If we can get vaccination a little bit sooner and be protected and protect other people, why not?”
Chand Shah, a 25-year-old accountant, said he thought it was a "good idea" to get the vaccine ahead of the possible further easing of restrictions.
Asked if he expected to get his vaccine so soon, he said: "No. I was expecting August to be honest."
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He added: "I think if you get the vaccine you feel safer."
University College London today became the first institution to offer its students a Covid jab today.
The session was due to be held between 12pm and 4pm but vaccines ran out just after 2pm.
Groups of students could be seen queuing outside the Hunter Street Clinic in Kings Cross hoping to be one of the lucky few.
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It comes after more than 15,000 people queued for a jab at Twickenham Stadium on Monday to get a vaccine.
Queues at the rugby stadium were "longer than Glastonbury" as tens of thousands of young people patiently waited.
Anyone under the age of 30 was invited to come along for a jab as health chiefs tried to shift doses to meet targets.
At the moment, Government rules say that only people over 30 are eligible to have the vaccine.
And all over-50s will be offered a second jab in the coming weeks to try and ensure the UK can throw off its final lockdown restrictions on June 21.
Ministers are hoping to plough through the rollout as quickly as possible to combat the rising threat of the Indian variant.
Boris Johnson is now battling to keep his pledge to lift the rules completely on June 21 - the final phase of his roadmap.
The Sun revealed today how a secret plan is being worked on to delay lockdown lifting by two weeks.
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A Government spokeswoman said "no decision" had been made on whether to ease all restrictions on June 21.
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She added: "As the Prime Minister has set out, we can see nothing in the data at the moment to suggest that we need to deviate from the roadmap.
"We continue to look at the data and the latest scientific evidence and no decision on Step 4 has yet been made."
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