The North East gears up for Covid booster vaccination programme

• Video report by Tom Barton.

The North East is gearing up for its booster vaccination programme after the PM announced last night (December 12th) an extension of the scheme.

It will see all adults in England to be offered a booster jab by the end of the year.

A South Tyneside GP and chair of the British Medical Association, Dr George Rae said: "The was no advance warning that this was going to happen, indeed I heard for the first time last night as many of the population would have heard."

The sudden ramping up of the booster vaccination programme is in reaction to the spread of the Omicron variant in the UK.

That means another massive effort from the NHS, the army and volunteers to get ahead of the virus' spread.

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A marketing firm in Newcastle has sent most of its staff home after the government's work from home advice.

Ben Quigley at Different Narrative said: "We anticipated that something was going to happen, and of course we have had a lot of practice of this in the past year, so we have invested a lot of money on cloud computing technology to enable us to work remotely and we have kitted most of our team with laptops."