Dr. Colm Henry:

We have always been worried about certain groups that have a particular risk of developing serious illness from Covid-19 and that risk remains. The vaccine may not prevent a person from contracting the virus but we know it has been very effective in greatly reducing the risk of people progressing to serious illness, which can include admission to hospital or intensive care, or even death in some cases.

We recently published evidence from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre, HPSE, which looked at the impact of the vaccine programme from December 2022 March 2023. It estimates that we have had 15,000 fewer deaths than we would have expected if there had not been a vaccination programme. It also noted 4,000 fewer admissions to intensive care units. We would not have had the ICU beds for those patients. It estimates up to 100,000 fewer admissions to hospital. Again, we would not have had places for those patients. There is now strong evidence emerging that the vaccine programme we have had to date has reduced a serious illness to a significant extent among the Irish population.

For immunosuppression, it is people on chemotherapy for cancer treatment, people who have blood disorders, people on long-term medications, such as steroids, and people with chronic renal disease. We know that these groups cannot muster the same immunological response to either the natural infection or vaccination and are particularly prone to a conversion to serious illness.

It is those people, as well as those with chronic illness and those who are older, who embrace the vaccine consistently at higher levels. Those are the people we need to focus on to take the vaccine because the vaccine wanes after a number of months. Our own healthcare workers are working with those people in different settings. The vaccine is particularly important. They have a responsibility not just to themselves but to the patients they are minding to make sure they are protected from contracting an illness which might not be serious to healthcare workers but might prove very serious to somebody who is hospitalised with immunosuppression.