When Covid-19 descended on the UK at the beginning of last year, I don’t think any of us anticipated the immense battle that lay ahead.

It has undoubtedly been the biggest peacetime task modern governments have faced.

As we embark on each day in our third lockdown, it is easy to lose sight of the progress that has been made.

People rejoiced back in November when it was announced that a vaccine had been found, and when the rollout for first the Pfizer vaccine, quickly followed by the Oxford vaccine, began people were full of optimism that an end to this dreadful period of our lives was in sight – and it is. However here in North Wales the vaccine rollout has been slow, in fact substantially slower than in other parts of Wales, and indeed the rest of the UK.

The figures for vaccination of whole population with at least one dose at the week ending January 17th were 4.4% in North Wales and 4.83% in Wales as a whole, compared to 6.32% in England, and 6.08% for the UK.

And whilst the Welsh Health Minister Vaughan Gething MS stated in the Welsh Parliament last week (January 19th) that his understanding was that “we have already managed to” vaccinate “the majority of our over-80s population,” statistics provided two days later by Public Health Wales showed in fact just under a quarter of over 80s in Wales had been given their first dose of coronavirus vaccine. Up until this time, there had been 43,879 doses - which is just 23.9% of this priority group.

The huge difference between the Minister’s claim in the Welsh Parliament and the statistics published by Public Health Wales shows a Minister that is not across important detail and it is little wonder that my inbox is full of emails from concerned constituents.

People in their 80s are angry and want to know why they still haven’t been invited for their vaccine, particularly when they are reading and watching reports of people in the same age bracket receiving theirs over the border in England.  

And they were further outraged last week when the First Minister revealed on Radio 4 that Wales is not using all its available Pfizer vaccine to vaccinate people as quickly as possible and give them increased safety against the virus because he does not want to leave vaccinators "standing around with nothing to do" for weeks!

As my colleague Welsh Conservatives’ Older People’s Champion, Janet Finch-Saunders MS, flagged up in the Welsh Parliament last week, these delays are having a huge detrimental effect on those aged 70 or older, who, being at increased risk from Covid-19,  have largely remained indoors since last March and consequently are struggling with loneliness, fear, and anxiety as a result.

Welsh Conservatives have repeatedly called on the Welsh Government to appoint a dedicated Vaccines Minister who could focus solely on the rollout and delivering vaccines faster, but to no avail.

As the Shadow Health Minister Andrew RT Davies has said: “We want the government’s vaccination programme to be a success, because if that succeeds, then so does Wales.”

Quite frankly the lack of urgency on vaccine rollout from the First Minister and his government is alarming and will cost lives.  

It's time to stop plodding, start sprinting, and protect vulnerable people in Wales as soon as possible.