Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his acknowledgment of the huge work that is being done, not by any of us here but by the Irish people in sticking with a very hard regimen of measures. It is working. Even with this awful B117 variant and its significant contagion, we are still, week by week, steadily reducing the number of cases. I believe we are now about the fourth lowest in Europe. We just need to keep going.

The Deputy's point on the interval between doses is an excellent question and one that NIAC has been looking at and will continue to look at. Some concerns have been raised in terms of a fall-off in effectiveness or levels of protection if the interval is too long. That is something NIAC is paying attention to and if it makes any recommendations to us, whether on the mRNA vaccines or in regard to AstraZeneca, that is something we certainly will look at.

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