Professor Mary Keogan:

Thankfully, in order to do a validation study in a sector then the sector must be functioning. We cannot do a validation while international travel is shut down.

We can learn a lot from the meat plants because the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine worked very closely with the steering group, and we designed the study collaboratively. We designed the study in a way that it would bring key learnings for the meat processing plants and also information that would be of interest to other sectors. I would like to acknowledge the role of John Salmon who is a member of the group because he played an enormous role.

The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine recruited a lot of its scientists to support the validation study. There is no way that we could have succeeded in testing over 5,000 individuals in parallel with PCR in the meat plants without that support from the sector.