Lisa Chambers (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber. It is an unenviable task to try to co-ordinate the logistics and roll out a vaccination programme with multiple vaccines in such a short time. It is quite a feat of human engineering to be able to bring these vaccines to the market in such a short time and to have them transported across the globe to vaccinate people as quickly as possible. We should not underestimate that logistical task. It is important that the effectiveness of the programme is not compromised in any way when we bring speed into the process. There should be no mistakes along the way. We must keep a track of everyone who has received the vaccine and the only way we can do that is to have proper systems and processes in place to do it. We will pay the price down the line if things are not done steadily and properly from the outset.

There are a couple of issues that I wish to raise and that have come to me through representations from various groupings. It is welcome that so many different groups are lobbying to get bumped up the list, for want of a better phrase, because the fear was that there would be a massive anti-vaccination campaign, people would be too afraid to take the vaccine and we would not reach the crucial 70% vaccination target in the country. That fear is gone now because people want this vaccine as quickly as they can get it. I am certainly in that category, although, rightly, much further down the line than many others. I am here to advocate for some of those others today.

We need to ensure that there is confidence throughout the vaccine programme. We have only started this process so there is a long way to go yet, but to ensure that confidence, we must underpin the programme with transparency and fairness. Those two things are key. People need to know what is happening and why, every step of the way. They need to know where the vaccines are coming from, how they will get here, why there is a delay if there is one, why they are going where they are going, and the rationale behind those decisions. People need to be fully informed every step of the way.

Fairness must underpin the vaccine programme, and there have been some deficiencies in that regard since the programme began. We have to give a little bit of leeway there because the programme had only just started, was still bedding in and the guidelines were still filtering across the system. We have to give people the benefit of the doubt that those mishaps at the beginning will not happen again. I am referring to the instances where those who were not on the priority list were vaccinated ahead of those who should have got the vaccine first. A number of facilities were involved in that, some of which made the media while others did not. My understanding is that those who were not top of the list were getting in ahead of others in a number of facilities and that should not happen. I hope that is the end of it.

We are going down the line of vaccinating based on age and I question that, not to be difficult but because we have to have these conversations. Age is just a number and is an arbitrary way of assessing the need for a vaccine. A 70-year-old might be in the best of health and would run rings around somebody in their 40s. Somebody in their 30s or 40s may have cystic fibrosis or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD, and may be immunosuppressed or on a transplant list. Such individuals are in greater need than the 70-year-old I mentioned. Some of them have been cocooning since March 2020 because the risk to their life is greater than somebody who is older but perfectly healthy. The easy option is to choose to roll out a vaccine programme simply based on age. I ask the Minister of State to have that conversation with the Minister, Deputy Donnelly. There is no harm is doing things differently. We can change direction on this. There is nothing wrong with putting one's hands up and saying that, having had time to assess this, we think there is a better way to tweak the programme to make it more effective and work better for our citizens. I ask for that to be considered.

I spoke earlier today to a woman in her late 30s with a six-year-old child. She had a kidney transplant 23 years ago and is already doing better than her doctors ever thought she would when she had the transplant. She is immunosuppressed and has been on drugs since the day she got that transplant. She has not left her house or seen anybody, bar her husband and her child, for ten months. Her parents came to see her in her garden at Christmas.We all had a little bit of respite over the last ten months. We got a break at Christmas and got to see more people. That did not happen for those who are immunosuppressed because of the fear of catching Covid. The mortality rate for people in that category is between 20% and 25% as opposed to less than 1% for the rest of us. That is the general rate. I am not aware of everyone's medical history. I am assuming that, for the most part, we are all perfectly healthy. This person's biggest fear was that her child, who was going to school, might bring the virus home. Her husband has not seen his elderly mother or had a cup of tea with her for ten months because he will not go into anybody else's house for fear that he might bring the virus home to his wife. That woman should not be waiting for the vaccine. She needs it more than somebody in his or her 80s who is quite healthy and who has no underlying conditions.

Although I am out of time, I will make two more very brief points. The first relates to the vaccine companies. The Minister needs to talk to the Taoiseach and the Cabinet. We need answers as to why the vaccine companies have not met their contractual obligations to deliver the amount of vaccine they signed up to deliver. The citizens of this country need an answer to that question.

Finally, while we are rightly very focused on our surroundings, our country and our people, let us not forget the world's poorest populations and the poorest countries in the world. They are not getting the same access to the vaccine that we are getting. We have a moral and ethical obligation as a First World country to lead and to ensure that people in the world's poorest countries have the same access to the vaccine as we do. Let us not rely on the drug companies to do that job; we must do it ourselves.