Thousands of hospital staff will join the drive to vaccinate all adults in England against coronavirus and will be deployed at mass vaccination centres, each of them aiming to give the jab to up to 5,000 people a day, NHS officials involved in the plans said.

The Pfizer coronavirus vaccine could be available in the UK within 21 days, according to Matt Hancock.

A major NHS inoculation programme could mean grandparents might be able to hug their grandchildren over Christmas.

The Health Secretary told MPs the first doses of the drug may be ready by December 1 - and could “inject hope into millions of arms this winter”.

First in the queue for immunisation would be care home residents and workers.

The NHS intends to use football stadiums, town halls and conference buildings in England to inoculate at least 2,000 people per centre each day. In urban areas, there will be a network of these centres.

The new facilities will be additional to the 1,560 community-based vaccination centres run by GPs, which will each dispense 200 to 500 jabs a day. Other forms of vaccination are also planned, including mobile vans and visits to homes and prisons. All the venues will do temperature checks on people before entry allowing space for social distancing and a 15-minute recovery time.

Neither NHS England nor the government has so far published an overall projection for how many vaccinations all these venues and methods of delivery will carry out daily in total. NHS England is expected to publish its “deployment plan”, outlining the rollout, next week.

However, seconding personnel from already under-staffed hospitals to aid the vaccine rollout could lead to patients having to wait longer for care. The NHS is already facing a massive backlog of cases due to its decision to suspend most non-Covid care provision in the spring.

NHS England has asked health service heads across England to be ready to vaccinate many numbers of people at large sites not in use because of the pandemic.

The details emerged as government figures showed the UK’s Covid-19 death toll has surpassed 50,000, adding to the pressure to roll out a comprehensive vaccination programme as soon as possible.

The centres are also expected to play a key role in immunising the general public in a second phase of the vaccination programme, following the dispensing of two doses each to the estimated 22 million, including carehome residents, NHS staff and those aged 50 or over, considered a priority.