Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am receiving many of the same understandable questions. I have asked the HSE to produce a detailed note in the coming days on exactly this issue. At a high level, however, cohort 2 includes pharmacists and dentists. As I said earlier, the HSE has made a clinical position on carers, which is that carers in the formal sector, that is, carers who are employed as such, are also included in cohort 2. By Sunday, we will have hit a little under half of that group of front-line healthcare workers. There are 150,000 people, or thereabouts, in that group. We will have hit, perhaps, a touch above 70,000 people and then we will keep going. From Sunday, notwithstanding some outliers, the residential care facilities and nursing homes will have been done. The vaccination path for those two groups is set because it is 28 days after a person gets his or her first vaccination. The vaccination path for the 70,000 who are done is set for the same reason and the other group we will do straight away is the other half, that is, the pharmacists, dentist, carers and many others who are moving into that between now and mid-February.

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