Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As the Ceann Comhairle will be aware, I objected at the Business Committee to the short amount of time available for the debate on the vaccine. I will add to the points that have already been made. This is a huge undertaking, and People Before Profit is very pleased that we have, or hope to have very soon, vaccines available. We have no doubt about their importance in trying to combat the pandemic, but significant measures need to be put in place to make this vaccine roll-out campaign a success. We need a major public health education campaign about the importance of vaccines and the roles they have played in the past. We need to address the huge deficit we have in our public health teams, which will be a part of the roll-out.

I had a very alarming conversation with one of our public health doctors who described in grim detail the lack of IT, the lack of a vaccine register, the chronic understaffing of our public health teams and the lack of integration of those teams with the rest of our health system. Because of the lack of resourcing and staffing of our public health teams, we will have to co-ordinate many different moving parts in a fragmented system to try to develop what should be a cohesive and integrated vaccine campaign.

There are therefore very many reasons to be concerned. There is also the issue of intellectual property rights in respect of the global roll-out of this vaccine to poor countries. If they do not get the vaccine, it could potentially undermine the efficacy of the vaccine everywhere. There are a lot of issues, more than I can enunciate in the short time available to me. We need a longer debate on this. The amount of time available to the small parties is ridiculous and unacceptable.

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