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* "Very perilous moment", Johnson says
* Hospitals running out of oxygen
* Dangerous time ahead for health service - medical adviser
* UK has vaccinated 2 million so far
* People must stick to lockdown rules, Johnson says
(Adds details from news conference, vaccination stats)
By Michael Holden
LONDON, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Prime Minister Boris Johnson said
on Monday Britain was in "a race against time" to roll out
COVID-19 vaccines as deaths hit record highs and hospitals ran
out of oxygen, and his top medical adviser said the pandemic's
worst weeks were imminent.
A new, more transmissible variant of the disease is now
surging through the population, with one in 20 people in parts
of London now infected, threatening to overwhelm the National
Health Service (NHS) as hospitals fill up with patients.
The death toll in the United Kingdom has been soaring and
now stands in excess of 81,000 - the world's fifth-highest
official toll - while more than three million people have tested
positive.
In a bid to get on top of the pandemic and to try to restore
some degree of normality by the spring, Britain is rushing out
its largest ever vaccination programme, with shots to be offered
to about 15 million people by the middle of next month.
"It's a race against time because we can all see the threat
that our NHS faces, the pressure it's under, the demand in
intensive care units, the pressure on ventilated beds, even the
shortage of oxygen in some places," Johnson said on a visit to a
vaccination centre in Bristol, in southwest England.
"This is a very perilous moment. The worst thing now for us
is to allow success in rolling out a vaccine programme to breed
any kind of complacency about the state of the pandemic."
The government's chief medical adviser Chris Whitty earlier
said the situation was set to deteriorate.
"The next few weeks are going to be the worst weeks of this
pandemic in terms of numbers into the NHS," he told BBC TV.
"Anybody who is not shocked by the number of people in
hospital who are seriously ill at the moment and who are dying
over the course of this pandemic, I think, has not understood
this at all. This is an appalling situation," he told BBC TV.
VACCINATION TARGET
Health minister Matt Hancock said there were now more than
32,000 COVID-19 patients in hospital, far more than the roughly
18,000 hospitalised during the peak of the first wave of the
pandemic in April.
Johnson's government is pinning its hopes on a mass
vaccination programme after Britain became the first country to
approve vaccines developed by Oxford-AstraZeneca and by
Pfizer/BioNTech . It also approved Moderna's
shot last Friday.
Its plan, announced on Monday, envisages two million shots
being delivered to around 2,700 centres a week in England by the
end of January, with the aim of immunising tens of millions of
people by the spring and all adults offered a vaccine by the
autumn.
The first daily vaccination statistics showed that nearly
2.3 million people had so far received their first doses of a
COVID vaccine and nearly 400,000 had received a second dose.
Johnson said more had received the vaccine in Britain than
in any other European country but admitted that inoculating 15
million people in the four highest risk levels, including those
over 70 and frontline health workers, by a Feb. 15 target was "a
huge ask".
"We believe it's achievable, we're going throw absolutely
everything at it, to get it done," he said.
Opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer, who has repeatedly
accused Johnson of being too slow to respond to the pandemic,
said the prime minister's indecision had cost lives and worsened
the economic impact
Ministers and health chiefs have pleaded with Britons to
stay at home, amid fears that some people are not adhering to
the rules strictly enough, along with concern that the virus is
being spread in supermarkets.
Hancock said that support bubbles, where households can
"bubble" with another if they are single-person or fit other
criteria, would be maintained, but that rules on exercising with
someone else could be restricted.
"Where we have to tighten them, we will," Johnson said of
the rules.
(Additional reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, Kate Holton,
William Schomberg, Paul Sandle, Alistair Smout and James Davey;
writing by Michael Holden; editing by Estelle Shirbon, Guy
Faulconbridge, Angus MacSwan and Gareth Jones)
