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* UK hits 15 million vaccination target
* UK PM Johnson to judge this week on lockdown exit
* UK looking at vaccine certificates to help Britons travel
* Hotel quarantine is going smoothly, minister says
(Adds calls for lockdown to end)
By Guy Faulconbridge and Kate Holton
LONDON, Feb 15 (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Boris
Johnson will judge this week how fast England can exit COVID-19
lockdown after vaccinating 15 million of its most vulnerable
people, but the health minister said death and hospital
admission numbers were still too high.
With nearly a quarter of the United Kingdom's population now
inoculated with a first dose of a COVID vaccine in a little over
two months, Johnson is under pressure from some lawmakers and
businesses to reopen the shuttered economy.
"We've got to watch the data," Health Secretary Matt Hancock
told Sky News. "Everybody wants to get out of this as quickly as
we safely can, and both as quickly, but also as safely, are
important.
"The question is a judgment of how quickly and safely, how
quickly we can do that safely. That's the judgment that we're
making this week, looking at the data, ahead of the prime
minister setting out the roadmap, on the 22nd," he said.
The biggest and swiftest global vaccine rollout in history
is seen as the best chance of exiting the COVID-19 pandemic
which has killed 2.4 million people, tipped the global economy
into its worst peacetime slump since the Great Depression and
upended normal life for billions.
Britain has vaccinated 15.062 million people with a first
dose and 537,715 with a second dose, the fastest rollout per
capita of any large country. Hancock said he expected vaccine
supplies to increase as manufacturing accelerated.
An influential group of lawmakers in Johnson's Conservative
Party are calling for the end of lockdown as soon as the most
vulnerable nine groups are vaccinated. They want no more rules
beyond May 1.
"We're all filled with sorrow for the people we've lost, the
harms that we've suffered but we don't honour those we've loved
and lost by wrecking the rest of our lives," lawmaker Steve
Baker said. "We've got to find a way to rebuild our society and
our economy and our prospects, our livelihoods."
Hancock said the British government was speaking to other
countries across the world about giving British people
certificates showing they had been vaccinated so that they could
travel abroad in the future to countries that require them.
"There is this international work going on because if other
countries require (proof of vaccination) we want to allow Brits
to be able to travel to those countries," Hancock said.
"We'd want to be able to facilitate that sort of vaccine
certification, but it isn't anything we're planning to introduce
here," he said, adding that a so-called vaccine passport was not
something that would be required to access services in the UK.
The United Kingdom has the world's fifth-worst official
death toll - currently 117,166 - after the United States,
Brazil, Mexico and India.
A new COVID-19 hotel quarantine system for arrivals from 33
"red list" countries, intended to limit the spread of new
variants of the virus, appeared to be working smoothly a few
hours after it was introduced, Hancock said.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and Kate Holton; Editing by
James Davey, Peter Graff and Nick Macfie)
