More than 5 million people have had second Covid-19 vaccine dose

Boris Johnson announced the figure on Twitter, saying: “We've reached another milestone in our vaccination programme with over 5 million people now having had their second jab.

“I urge everyone to take up their second dose as soon as they are offered it.”

Government data up to April 2 shows that of the 36,631,187 jabs given in the UK so far, 31,425,682 were first doses – a rise of 124,415 on the previous day.

Some 5,205,505 were second doses, an increase of 256,870.

Second doses of the vaccine are being prioritised in April amid a warning that supplies will fall.

Despite this, the Government has said it is still on course to offer all adults in the UK a first jab by the end of July.

The vaccine figure comes as NHS England confirmed on Saturday, April 3, that a further 41 people who tested positive for coronavirus have died in hospital in England, bringing the total number of confirmed deaths reported in hospitals to 86,392.

Patients were aged between 30 and 98 and all except five, aged between 70 and 93, had known underlying health conditions.

Meanwhile, evidence is growing that the occurrence of a number of rare blood clot events among people who have had the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine is “causally related”, a scientist has said.

The Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said on Thursday that it had identified 30 cases of rare blood clot events among people in the UK who had received the AstraZeneca jab, following similar reports from Germany.

However Professor Paul Hunter, a medical microbiologist at the University of East Anglia, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that the risks of taking the AstraZenca vaccine were still far outweighed by the risks of not getting the jab.

“The chance of dying if you don’t have the vaccine is many times greater than the risk of dying from CVT (cerebral venous thrombosis) after the AstraZeneca vaccine, even if it does turn out, as I suspect it will, that this link is causal,” he said.

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