Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is again welcome to the House. I join others in commending all those people who have done really important and extraordinary work in rolling out vaccines. However, in hearing everybody's stories about how wonderful it has been to get a vaccine and what it meant for children and families, there is a heartbreaking component to the discussion. It is that there are people all over this planet with families, some of them going to work on the front line of health services, who are years away from vaccination. They are just like us, with families like ours and with hopes and fears like ours.

I look at the six months we have lost in a process for a trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, TRIPS, waiver, which was proposed and would have allowed and supported the scaling up of vaccine roll-out internationally. Let us be clear that it is BioNTech's incredible work with the mRNA vaccine and of course it should be celebrated. Nonetheless, we are talking about booster doses for us while the rest of the world does not have access to a vaccine. That is entirely due to the fact that we are guarding a profit mechanism, which is a choice. There are now 62 countries, even including the United States, calling for a waiver on intellectual property. Every argument put forward by Europe has been debunked by experts, including the World Health Organization and others.

We know there are 144 facilities with manufacturing capacity in 35 countries that could be scaled up but we are still seeing mechanisms talking about licensing. The European Union, having been embarrassed into some kind of action, is now talking about letting a few partners in the global south into manufacturing through licensing rather than a temporary TRIPS waiver. The COVAX process is fine but that is about vaccinating 20% of the world. Let us be clear that the Covid technology access pool, a mechanism of the World Health Organization, is required to ensure quality in the roll-out. The European Union bears responsibility if we continue to be the main blocker of access to vaccines for the world.

We might need to attach our name to all the variants that may come, and certainly if variants are coming in six months when they should not have to. Maybe they should be named after us since they will arise because of the European Union. The B.1.617.2 variant and others are coming now but we can do more. We could be in a different place in January 2022 but Europe must stop its obstruction of the process. The European Parliament has now called on the European Union to take action and I have certainly been glad to add my voice to the voices of other parliamentarians across Europe in saying we need to allow global access to vaccines. The Minister is aware the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade has also called for that.

There are still issues with the Irish programme, particularly with group 9 and overcrowded settings. The Minister might agree that prisoners could and should fall into that category. There are concerns about cohort 7 as a whole falling through the cracks. Traveller organisations have been clear they want a dual approach to vaccines, as it seems that the HSE, since March, has basically only been offering the Janssen vaccine to Travellers. This appears to come from an assumption of vaccine hesitancy and that a single dose would be preferable but we know much of that population is under 50 and are not, therefore, the ideal candidates for the Janssen vaccine because of its heightened risk for people under 50. It is really important there is a another route. I have more detailed notes from my colleague, Senator Flynn, on this and she has been very clear about the NIAC advice on the age cohort overlap.

I am also concerned about young people who are part of cohort 7 and still waiting for a vaccine. They will lose their unemployment payment and many will be asked to work in hospitality or similar jobs. They may be in cohort 7 and be asthmatic. There are people in their 20s and 30s in that space falling between those gaps.

There have been very positive experiences at the centres but I have heard of single parents having difficulty. They are sometimes not in the position to have somebody caring for their child and need to bring the child to the vaccine centre. That has been brought to my attention.

Indefinite retention of the data used to access the vaccine portal falls outside the scope of GDPR. We should not have another obstacle to people being vaccinated. We know that where there is an imbalance of power, we must be very clear on the statutory basis for any measure. We cannot ask people to consent to indefinite retention of data as a condition of getting something that might save their lives. I am concerned that we are on legally ambiguous ground. Perhaps we will have an opportunity to engage on the matter to ensure we do it properly.