Dark skies gather over Britain as a new wave of Covid looms

Joe Buglass tried 46 times to call his GP about booking a Covid booster jab last Wednesday. “The phone was just ringing and ringing,” he said. He had tried several times over the previous six weeks, since getting an NHS text message.

Buglass, who runs a property maintenance business in Newcastle, is clinically vulnerable because he donated a kidney. When he finally got through, he was told he was ringing the wrong people. Eventually, someone rang him back. “They told me that because the clinics were finishing this Sunday, they didn’t have any bookings for the next few weeks,” he said. He was incredulous. “Where do I go from here?” He was later offered a booster jab for last Sunday after a cancellation. “They said because of the Covid cases rising, all the [medical] personnel were getting pulled back to hospital.”

Problems like Buglass’s are echoed by hundreds on