Keir Starmer calls for all teachers to be vaccinated during the February half-term

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer calls for all teachers to be vaccinated in the February half-term.

Responding to the prime minister, Starmer said Boris Johnson should ‘bring forward’ vaccines for teachers and school staff to fulfil the ‘national priority of reopening schools’. 

The Labour leader says he ‘welcomes’ any steps being taken towards reopening schools but is highly critical of the PM’s opening and closing of classrooms.

Starmer describes the government’s U-turns on schools as ‘the kind of nonsense that’s led to the highest death toll in Europe’.

He then repeated his calls to vaccinate teachers during the half-term, explaining that they should be given their first dose once the 14 million people in the top priority groups have had their first jab.

The government is aiming for over-70s, care home residents, frontline health and social care workers, and the clinically extremely vulnerable to have their first dose of the vaccine by February 15th, the start date for most schools’ half term. 

Starmer asked Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday: “Everybody agrees that reopening our schools should be a national priority. But that requires a plan, and the PM hasn’t got a plan.

“So as a first step, does he agree with me that once the first four categories and the most vulnerable have been vaccinated by mid-February, he should bring forward the vaccination of key workers and use the window of the February half-term to vaccinate all teachers and all school staff?”

Johnson rejected this, saying only teachers and school staff in the top nine groups will be given priority for the vaccine. 

Starmer criticised the PM saying that half term is a ‘fantastic opportunity’ to vaccinate teachers, but that he is ‘no wiser as to whether the PM thinks that’s a good idea or a bad idea’.

The prime minister insists that schools are not un-safe, explaining that the problem is they ‘bring communities together’ and ‘a large number of kids are a considerable vector of transmission’.

He added that the prioritisation of the vaccine should be up to experts not politicians, and that Starmer’s policy suggestion ‘would actually delay our route out of lockdown’.

Earlier today Boris Johnson confirmed that schools wouldn’t reopen before March 8th at the earliest.