Health chiefs in the region have claimed Northumberland has had the highest uptake of the coronavirus vaccine compared to any other region in England.

The officials claim that 227,884 jabs have been give out so far in the region, which has covered a total of 83.4% of everyone who is so far eligible for a jab.

However, despite the seemingly positive figures, at a recent Northumberland County Council, Cllr. Richard Dodd raised the question about the people who so far have refused the injection they have been invited to receive.

“We’re going to get to a stage where we’ve vaccinated everyone who wants it – but what happens to the people who don’t want it?,” said Cllr Dodd at the council’s Health and Wellbeing Overview and Scrutiny Committee.

“Is there a plan to tackle people who don’t understand what their problem is?

“We’re going to run out of people to vaccinate and we’re going to try and find the people who don’t want it, presumably?”

Almost 400,000 vaccines have so far been given out across the whole of Northumberland with 171,296 of them being second doses.

As a result, this means 62.7% of everyone eligible to do so has had their two jabs against coronavirus.

In light of the figures, Rachel Mitcheson, a service director at Northumberland Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) added that their could be a number of different reasons as to why not everyone has so far taken up their offer of a jab.

“People will have different issues and those are all very valid issues that we need to respond to,” she said.

“At the moment there are 11,000 people in Northumberland over the age of 50 who haven’t had a first vaccine, so there is still some work that we can do to identify those people who haven’t responded as opposed to those people who have refused to have a vaccine.”

Nationally, over 42 million people have had their first jab against Covid-19 at time of writing, while over 30 million have had their second jab also.