Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It does, because I am concerned about the lack of a clear rationale for some of the powers that the Minister wishes to have. I want to explain that we need a rationale for a policy and a strategy. It is not clear at this point what the rationale is because at a particular point in the evolution of this pandemic, everybody believed that there was a possibility that if we got to a certain level of vaccination – the figure that was being floated at that time was about 70% - or immunity through natural infection, that we would reach a point where the R number of Covid-19 would start to decline. Essentially, it would go below one and we could seriously consider the possibility that the disease would fizzle out. That was the belief at the time. We have now discovered that that is not the case; that even with 95% vaccination, a figure nobody ever dreamed possible, that we are not looking at the possibility of the virus disappearing.

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