Mr. Paul Reid:

I thank the Deputy for his opening comments. I will make a brief comment on his opening comments about vaccines. We certainly are in a much stronger position than we could have expected in terms of the benefits we are seeing from the vaccination programme, both in reduced hospitalisations and visits to ICU. As of last night, we had 39 hospitalisations, of whom 13 were in ICU. Contrast that with the dark days of January when there were 2,020 in hospital and 212 people in ICU. We are seeing the benefits, including in the public mood.

Our experience and that of the public is that every time we think we are ahead of the virus, whether that was last summer or Christmas, it has a tendency to bite back. The immediate concern is the Delta variant. We are seeing in the percentage rise in cases, not just in Ireland but in European countries and cities, a very prevalent surge in the Delta variant. There is no reason to expect that Ireland will be any different or that we will not see a surge in Delta variant cases. That is a trend we are beginning to see and it is a concern. Notwithstanding that, we are in a much stronger position than we might have expected.

On vaccines for the 60 to 69 years cohort, we take all of our administration of vaccines guidance from the national immunisation advisory committee. It gives guidance to the CMO who makes recommendations to the Government and we comply with all of that. In fairness to NIAC, it takes the best world evidence and monitors that carefully daily and weekly. It continues to do that. The guidance and advice at that stage was that AstraZenica was suitable to be administered to people above the ages of 50. The risks that were prevalent at that stage were to population ages below that. That was the process then.

In terms of the timeframe, it had been, if the Deputy recalls, the administration of a second dose was moved from 12 weeks to 16 weeks. That interval has now moved back to eight weeks. We have a programme in place whereby last week alone, almost 100,000 people were given their second dose of AstraZenica. This applies to about 450,000 people in total. The process will be accelerated and instead of a nine-week programme, it will be a five-week programme. Everybody in all the age groups that received AstraZenica should have received the second dose by the week commencing 19 July. That accelerates the process and we will increasingly see people in the 60 to 69 years cohort. We are vaccinating by age so the vast majority of the people who received the second dose last week should have been in that age cohort.