Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputies for their questions. The question on rapid testing is a very good and pertinent one. I have raised with the Commission and the other health ministers that there should be a centralised clearing house and some sort of co-ordination in terms of the ability to validate and then deploy antigen testing and also to share information across the EU. I can say to the Deputy that I think there is a bigger opportunity to use antigen and rapid testing in this country. I have set up an expert group chaired by Professor Mark Ferguson, who is director of Science Foundation Ireland and the Government's chief scientific adviser. He is looking at a quick review to see what are the appropriate tests to use, where are the appropriate settings to use them and how they should be used. I know he is doing very good work. In fact, I had to miss, with much regret, a meeting as part of his work that he set up with a Nobel laureate on exactly this issue last Friday.

In regard to underlying conditions, I ask that we pause here for a second. We have talked about this several times today. What I do not want to do is send out a message of false hope for any particular group. I am very aware that there will be people who are very sick, people who are dealing with very serious conditions and people who, quite understandably, very badly want to get vaccinated. They want to see where they are at. I do not want to give any false impressions. I ask that we be very clear on this because various groups have been raised today, including people with cystic fibrosis and those dealing with kidney issues, be it kidney transplant, dialysis and so forth. What I am saying is that I have asked the Department to review the situation specifically with regards to those who are very vulnerable to Covid because of underlying conditions. They will be a subset of what is currently cohort 7. There are many hundreds of thousands in that cohort because it covers everyone with an underlying condition. There is a smaller group within that who are really very susceptible. NIAC is doing some very detailed analysis on that now and I am expecting it to report back to the Department next week. The Chief Medical Officer and the Department of Health will be scrutinising that in great detail and I hope to be able to report to colleagues next week. I may not have all of the information and I may not have fully agreed answers for colleagues next week but I certainly want to be able to report back because I share the very serious concerns that have been raised.

I am out of time but I will answer the final point briefly, which was about the vaccine manufacturers scaling up production.

If they do scale up and if further options become available, we will look into buying or opting in to them. What I can say now is that we have advance purchase agreements in place for almost 16 million doses across the various vaccines.

See this speech in context