Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising the issue of the vaccine. It is a historic day and a vindication of science as the ultimate route to follow in dealing with this terrible virus that has wreaked such havoc across the world in terms of lives lost, of people becoming ill with long-term consequences and of economic and social upheaval. It has changed our way of living. I applaud the Deputy's initiative and I would have no difficulty in signing such a petition. We need to be strong and positive in support of vaccination to eliminate a virus which has caused devastation, ill health and death across the world.

The objective of vaccination, historically, has been to eliminate such diseases and viruses. The history of vaccination was an extraordinary one in the 20th century, in terms of healthcare and health outcomes. This is often forgotten as time moves on and that which was horrendous in one era becomes commonplace and of no consequence in the next era because of vaccines and medicines more generally. We need to make sure fake news does not get prevalence and does not get promoted on the digital platforms the Deputy referred to. That is a fair point.

I can recall all of the issues around the MMR vaccine when I was Minister for Health and Children and the huge damage that was done at the time. We had to put up with a measles outbreak for two or three years and children became very ill and, in some cases, lost their lives as a result of that campaign.

We await the outcome of the European Medicines Agency in respect of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and then the Moderna vaccine on 11 January. The Government has announced today the provisional vaccine allocation strategy and the groups that will receive the vaccines in sequence, particularly the aged, those in our nursing homes and our healthcare workers as key priority groups. That is particularly important.

I will receive the blueprint from the task force on Friday. That will be the culmination of a lot of work undertaken by various work streams involving a lot of bodies. To be fair regarding the vaccine allocation strategy, the national immunisation committee, which has been responsible for many immunisation programmes, made a provisional recommendation, which NPHET has endorsed, in terms of the sequencing. All I will say is that individual Deputies may have issues around that and may have their own queries but fundamentally, we should allow the public health experts and science inform that as well. I think that if we allowed a situation where Deputies and Senators were going to decide who got what in sequence, we would be here for quite a long time in itself.

I take the Deputy's proposal on board as one that is designed to try to increase participation rates in terms of the vaccines to make sure that we get herd immunity and can eliminate this virus once and for all.

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