All adults in Ireland could be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 up to a month sooner than expected, according to the head of the HSE.
Paul Reid said all adults could have received full protection by the end of August or early September if new arrangements being put in place work out as planned, according to The Irish Times.
The HSE previously forecasted that all adults who wanted a vaccine could be fully vaccinated by the end of September.
Mr Reid suggested that allowing vaccines from Janssen and AstraZeneca to be used for younger people, along with proposals for the State to buy up to one million mRNA vaccines from Romania, had the potential to “pull things forward” in terms of overall timelines for Ireland’s vaccine rollout.
“Ultimately if we can work through all of that it could bring us right back to the end of August, early September,” Mr Reid told RTÉ’s This Week programme on Sunday.
“That’s where it could bring us if everything comes forward, the take up is as we project, there’s a few variables in there.”
Extra five per cent
It was now projected that there would be just over 200,000 doses of the Janssen vaccine available in July, Mr Reid said. He said for every 37,500 of these vaccines used, it represented another one per cent of the population fully vaccinated.
“That really gives us the potential of up to about five per cent extra (of the population) being competed in July. It is very significant for us in terms of full completion of vaccines,” he said.
Mr Reid said with the current streams of vaccines available at present, the HSE had forecast that between 60 to 63 per cent of the adult population would be fully vaccinated by the end of July.
“Certainly if we add in and fully utilise all of the 200,000 doses of Janssen, that will bring us closer to 68 per cent by the end of July.”
Half a million more
Mr Reid said the projected one million additional mRNA vaccines from Romania would allow for 500,000 more people to be fully vaccinated.
“That is another 12 or 13 per cent. We are putting this all together right now. But ultimately it has a real potential to pull things forward.”
He cautioned that “everything is built on supply lines”, however, and said the benefits of the double-dose AstraZeneca vaccines being administered would not come through fully until August.
At present, an estimated 350,000 jabs are being administered per week, with the majority coming from the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine.
Some 48 per cent of the adult population has been fully vaccinated, with 68 per cent having received a first dose.
Last week, a long-standing target of giving at least one dose to 82 per cent of adults was missed.
It comes as more than 1,000 new cases of Covid-19 were confirmed on the island of Ireland on Sunday, with 562 in the Republic — the highest number recorded in one day since early May.
