David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The bottom line is that it is down to the relationship between the European Commission and AstraZeneca but that shortfall will not be made up. That is what I am hearing. We are not going to get the vaccines that were committed to by AstraZeneca, which is deeply frustrating and deeply disappointing.

People want to know that the Minister can get what is under his remit right. I have two questions about that remit. The Minister spoke earlier about testing and tracing and said we can agree to disagree. I have never believed we got it fully right because testing and tracing has to be used to hunt down the virus and stay ahead of it. Many public health experts have written in our national newspapers and pointed out the same issue I have raised time and again. We simply do not have the capacity. We need thousands of contact tracers if we want to do the deep retrospective contact tracing that needs to be done. Last November the Minister and his Government committed to deep retrospective tracing to get to the source of infections and outbreaks, looking back over nine days and not 48 hours. Has that happened? Is it going to happen? How robustly is that going to happen? As we sit here today, how many contact tracers are employed in the HSE? How many of them are doing the type of deep retrospective contact tracing that is necessary?

Regarding the vaccine roll-out, will the Minister give us an assurance on it today? Of course it is good news that 1 million doses are coming in the second quarter, but as the administration of vaccines ratchets up, people will want to know the Minister can get the roll-out and the administration side right. Do we have the staff to make that happen?

See this speech in context