Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for the questions. The Deputy's question about projected supply and whether we can publish the amount expected to come in, week by week, is reasonable. The problem is that the amount expected to come in, week by week, is being changed, largely by AstraZeneca, and sometimes several times a week. That is causing untold anxiety in the community. It is eclipsing the good news that we are rolling out astonishingly effective vaccines to the most vulnerable groups of people and healthcare workers and that process is going well. The Deputy rightly referenced a GP clinic where the process has not worked perfectly and appointments had to be rescheduled for a week later. That should not happen but it did and similar problems affected approximately 65 of the 1,300 practices in the country. Those practices had much smaller groups of people to vaccinate. That should not have happened. The HSE has tried to learn from that and put in extra supports for GPs. What happened at the same time was that in the three-week period when the target was to vaccinate those aged 85 and older, 99% of that target group were vaccinated in that period. That is not a message that got out. The message that got out, understandably, was the number of examples in which the process did not work perfectly. We need it to work as perfectly as possible. The roll-out has not been flawless and lessons are being learned.

On the Deputy's suggestion that we state the amount of vaccines we will get, week by week, we know with absolute certainty that the amount will change regularly. We also know that is causing a lot of anxiety for people. We probably need to focus on the Deputy's related question about whether we can have indicative timelines, even the months when different groups of people will be vaccinated so that they know whether they will be vaccinated in April, May or June.

We will endeavour to do more on that to try to provide some certainty for people in order that, armed with that information, they can begin to plan and think about the rest of the year and the future.

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