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

I thank the Deputy for raising the issue. Without question, the vaccination programme and its roll-out are critical parts of the wider strategy to deal with the pandemic. The vast majority of people in Ireland are adhering to the guidelines and restrictions. That is having an impact in getting the hospital and intensive care unit, ICU, numbers down and reducing community transmission as the vaccination programme is being rolled out.

The national task force and the HSE are publishing data on vaccinations. The key is the ongoing issue of supply from AstraZeneca, Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna. There have, without question, been bumps along the way, most recently with the shortfall of supply last week from AstraZeneca, as the chair of the task force said last Saturday. The company believes that shortfall will be made up in the next week and will come through. There have been issues around supply and those were discussed at the European Council meeting where there was a dedicated meeting on Thursday last about European-wide vaccination. China, America and Europe are the major production centres for vaccines. Supply is the issue across the board. Europe has appointed a Commissioner to deal with removing bottlenecks affecting supply.

In the Irish context, we are administering that which we are getting in.

I will revert to the task force on the issues Deputy Shortall raised. There is no difficulty in having it go through the situation with the Deputy. We had to reconfigure following the decision by NIAC to provide the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines to the over-70s and the AstraZeneca vaccine to those under-70. That meant the roll-out had to be reconfigured through the GP network and as a result there can be a lag in data coming back into the centre. Essentially, we are administering the vaccines we get, apart from the ones that have been kept back for second doses.

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