Thursday 16 December 2021

Efforts to offer a Covid booster jab to all adults who want one by the end of the month are “achievable”, say health bosses in Yorkshire. The Government is offering everyone in England aged 18 or over the chance to book their third jab from this week – as long as it has been three months since their second dose. Yvette Oade, the NHS Vaccine Lead, for the Covid vaccination programme in Yorkshire and the Humber region, said: “It is achievable and last weekend we did do more than 100,000 doses on Saturday. So it’s achievable, but achieving it every day is our task.”

Almost 10,000 pigs in East Yorkshire have been culled due to a lack of workers to process the animals, a vet has said. Duncan Berkshire, a specialist pig vet, said many pigs were left stuck on farms rather than being sent to abattoirs, despite Government attempts to recruit extra butchers. And the National Pig Association said some abattoirs were running at 25 per cent below their usual capacity. Yorkshire is the UK’s largest pig breeding area, accounting for 37 per cent of the country’s total output. Mr Berkshire said the culling of healthy animals had “devastated” everybody working in the industry.

And finally, proposals to reinstate the York to Beverley rail line were top of the agenda when Beverley MP Graham Stuart met Chancellor Rishi Sunak. Mr Stuart told Beverley FM: “I wanted to confirm with the Chancellor that the Government is serious about levelling up parts of the country outside of London and the South East, and invest in giving us the kind of transport links they’re used to in that part of the country. Mr Stuart, incidentally, was not one of the rebel Conservative MPs to vote against the latest measures to curb the spread of the Omicron variant of Coronavirus.