Professor Brian MacCraith:

I thank the Deputy for his positive comments. It was certainly a massive team effort to put together the strategy and implementation plan over a period of just over four weeks. In respect of the Deputy's questions about the pharmaceutical companies, most of the dialogue in recent weeks has been with Pfizer-BioNTech, all of it mediated through the country manager here, who also happens to be called Paul Reid. We have seen indicative schedules. Things have been shifting as other factors have shifted. Regarding the potential imminent granting of conditional marketing authorisation, CMA, possibly as early as 23 December, the only strong indication we have is that a small supply of an initial quantity of vaccines is likely to be delivered to us before the end of December but we do not have confirmed details of exactly what we will be getting and when. There are indicative amounts but those have changed over the period of the past number of weeks as other circumstances have changed. The expectation is we will have a small quantity before the end of December. Things are typically shipped in what are called shipper frozen containers of just under 5,000 doses per shipper - 4,875 to be exact - that is, five containers of 195 vials each with each vial having five doses. The team we have working on logistics as one of the work streams is in regular contact with Pfizer-BioNTech so the team from the HSE national immunisation office and the logistics team are in regular contact. As of today, we do not have absolute confirmation of-----