UCL’s Saturday vaccinations reach ‘capacity’ within hours as 1,500 students descend on Hunter Street

The nation’s first walk-in university vaccine clinic runs out of jabs just hours after opening its doors.

Last Saturday, on June 5, UCL students living in and around Bloomsbury flocked to Hunter Street to receive a free Pfizer jab.

But the “first-come, first-served” vaccines soon ran out, leaving many students queuing in the sweltering heat frustrated.

The Mail on Sunday reported some students arrived as early as 5 a.m., seven hours before jabs were supposed to be made available to students at The Bloomsbury Surgery.

By around 2 p.m., UCL put out a Tweet informing students that the vaccines offered at the UK’s first walk-in university inoculation clinic were “now at capacity” and that they could not “accept any more students”. 

According to The Telegraph, the first 450 people to arrive at the walk-in vaccine clinic were given a ticket for their vaccine and an extra 250 received their jab after pre-booking their appointments. 

Lydia Yallop, a second-year human sciences student, got her dose of the Pfizer vaccine at around 1 p.m., almost 4 hours after joining the queue at 9 a.m. with her housemate.

Yallop explained to Pi Media that the queues were so long they “lapped round the block and went down multiple streets”.

The human sciences student said she was motivated to get jabbed as it is the “best chance” that Covid-restrictions will end. She also hopes to study in Canada in September and wants to get her second dose before the Autumn in case Ottawa introduces vaccine passports for overseas visitors.

Whilst Yallop claimed there are “valid” concerns about under 30s refusing to take the vaccine, she did argue “the amount of young people showing up to Twickenham Stadium and The Bloomsbury Surgery shows how willing the younger generation actually is to be vaccinated”.

However, other students were not as lucky as Yallop. Some spent up to six hours queuing in 22C just to be turned away before they could get inoculated.

Shuewen Tay, a first-year student from Malaysia, arrived at 10 a.m., but did not receive her Pfizer vaccine. She explained to Pi Media that there were around 1,000 students behind her in the queue. 

Like many young students, Tay wanted to “be vaccinated before clubs open”, which is currently in doubt due to the rumoured two-week delay to England unblocking. But she also wanted to get inoculated before visiting her grandparents.

Martin Merek, a second-year statistics student, told Pi Media that he “wasted his time unnecessarily” after arriving at Hunter Street at 10:30 a.m..

By 12:30 p.m., just half an hour after the surgery was initially supposed to open its doors, Merek and other queuing students were told to go home as jabs were soon to run out.

“I think it’s very unfortunate that UCL predicted the demand so poorly and then failed to react quickly enough”, said Merek.

“I don’t understand”, the statistics student continued, “how this happened, but apparently they only prepared a few hundred vaccines”. 

Merek also explained how he was “upset” by the two hours spent waiting for his inoculation as at around 11:00 a.m. queuing students started marching forward. 

He had previously joined the 15,000 people at Twickenham Stadium but was again unable to obtain his first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine due to limited supplies.

Overall, Merek estimates he has spent almost 8 hours trying to get vaccinated. 

Whilst he is now no longer confident that he can “rely” on future announcements to receive his jab, Merek claimed that queuing students who were not vaccinated were told they would receive an email from their GP in the next two weeks. 

Jamie Wong, a second-year population health sciences student, also tried to get his dose of the vaccine at both Twickenham and The Bloomsbury Surgery.

He joined the Saturday queue at around 11 a.m. and wanted to get his dose of the Pfizer vaccine to protect himself against Covid when working as a key worker at a shop in central London. 

Wong suggested any notion young people are hesitant to get the vaccine has been ramped up by the media. He recalled that young people at Twickenham Stadium were so determined to get inoculated that they “started running towards the stadium the moment they announced the gates would close imminently”. 

UCL is expected to provide further information about future vaccine clinics later this week for other students hoping to get the Pfizer jab.