Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. The sad fact is it could have been worse - it could have been much worse. Many countries around the world have not even started their vaccination programmes yet, and most EU countries are well behind us. We are in the top three or four European countries now in terms of the speed of the roll-out.

Yes, there are countries ahead of us, the United Kingdom, the United States and Israel, for example, but those countries are not part of the European Union. The vaccine was approved earlier in those places than it was here. That is not something that was under our control as a Government.

The majority of nursing home staff and residents have received a first dose of the vaccine. Some have received the second dose. In some cases it was not possible to give the vaccine because either the residents had coronavirus at the time or were sick or ineligible for another reason. Now the HSE is sweeping back to about 100 nursing homes to ensure they vaccinate anyone who was missed or could not have been vaccinated earlier.

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