Carol Nolan (Laois-Offaly, Independent)
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650. To ask the Minister for Health if he will he consider making a statement and taking questions in Dáil Eireann on the contract issued by his Department to a company (details supplied) given the clear concerns that have arisen around the miscategorisation of statements made by Members of the Houses of the Oireachtas with respect to Covid-19, vaccines and Government policy in this area more generally; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [57408/21]

Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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A core element of the COVID-19 Vaccine communications strategy involved encouraging the public to get the vaccine, informing them who will administer it and where, identifying people of trust to act as ambassadors for the vaccine and addressing emerging mis and disinformation themes relating to the COVID-19 vaccine.

This work was supplemented by the work of Kinzen, a company engaged by my Department in early 2021 to monitor the online dissemination of mis and disinformation relating to COVID-19 and COVID-Vaccines.

The daily report of mis and disinformation topics and trends provided to my Department and the HSE by Kinzen, supported by a weekly meeting involving my officials and officials from the HSE to discuss current themes proved invaluable and, in my opinion, contributed to Ireland's extraordinary success of Ireland's Vaccination Programme.

This enabled my Department to work with public health doctors to address the mis and disinformation and direct the public to official sources of information, such as the Department’s own website, the COVID-19 Data Hub and the HSE’s website. The HSE also undertakes considerable social media advertising campaigns in order to promote public health guidelines, advice and vaccine uptake across platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. The partnership with Kinzen allowed my Department and the HSE to target communications messages in a given week to support vaccine uptake.

As public representatives, it is incumbent on us all to continue to support the vaccination programme and to encourage everyone to access the trusted sources of information made available by my Department and the HSE as we progress rapidly through the booster programme.