Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 13 July 2021
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport
Implementation of the EU Digital Covid Certificate: Discussion
Mr. Damien McCallion:
Ms Canavan has covered the issue. It is difficult because the testing data I mentioned earlier is a skeletal data set. It is, therefore, difficult to connect those sets in absolute terms. Ms Canavan has covered the issue. We anticipate that by the end of this week, anyone in the over-50 set who previously tested positive will have been vaccinated. Some of the younger age groups who have tested positive have not yet been vaccinated. We are closing that gap all the time and, as the committee knows, our aim is to keep rolling through the age groups. We are currently vaccinating the 30- to 34-year-old cohort. We have the alterative opt-in option, given the risk of the Delta variant, which will be delivered in pharmacies. Moving into next week, that option will be available for younger age groups. All of that will help. We saw good uptake of the vaccine in pharmacies by younger age groups last week. We do not have an absolute number but it is certain that a reasonable proportion of the approximately 130,000 people who tested positive in the past six months will have been vaccinated and, therefore, will not have to use the route of phoning the call centre.
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