Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Absolutely, I will give the Deputy the latest figures I got this morning. On the target, Deputy Cullinane, the others in this Chamber and I have had this conversation week after week for months and months. Members of the Oireachtas have quite rightly said they want the forecasts and we have tried to provide them but as the Deputy will be aware, we have always done so with the heavy caveat that the Government target is to get them out the door and that provided they arrived, this then would be the number of people who would be seen. I ask that this spirit still be honoured now because that is how we have always operated. In respect of the Janssen vaccine, the issue involves manufacture in the US. We, together with the EMA, are waiting on a decision from the Food and Drug Administration, FDA, on a manufacturing plant in the US, which manufactures the Janssen vaccine. The EMA is waiting on it. We have been waiting for quite some time and the issue has been live for quite some time now. If the FDA approves, the EMA then needs to make a decision and that will inform the best and worst-case scenarios. I will give the Deputy some specifics as of this morning. We are contracted to receive approximately 600,000 doses; I will get the Deputy the exact numbers. For June, we were contracted to receive about 470,000 doses of Janssen. The best case I have as of this morning is that we would receive about half of that, about 235,000 doses. In the worst case, which the Deputy was looking for as well, believe it or not, it could be as low as approximately 60,000 in June.

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