Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly has defended the pace of the State’s vaccination programme.
“We’re not slow. We’re moving at the same pace as the rest of Europe,” he told Newstalk Breakfast on Thursday.
He said that by the end of the first quarter there will have been 470,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccines delivered into the country – around 350,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 110,000 of the Moderna vaccine, orders for which were confirmed on Wednesday night following its approval by the EU regulator.
Speaking on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland, Mr Donnelly said the Government was awaiting authorisation of the AstraZeneca vaccine and a further vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, which would be easy to apply and came in one dose.
He said the expectation was that by the end of the February all nursing home residents and staff and all frontline workers will have been vaccinated.
He said the only constraint on the State’s approach to the roll-out would be waiting for the doses to arrive.
Hospital capacity
On hospitals, Mr Donnelly said the situation was now “very serious”. He told Morning Ireland that the UK variant of the disease, which scientists believe spreads more quickly, was present “at a serious level” in the State and being detected in all areas.
The arrival of this variant made it difficult to model and project when the peak in cases would come, he said. More than 7,000 new cases were reported on Wednesday.
“The plan is not to run out of ICU beds,” he said, adding that this was why extra restrictions had been introduced yesterday.
Under surge capacity plans there would be 350 intensive care beds with a further 50 in private hospitals, if necessary, he added.
The message remained for people to stay at home, said Mr Donnelly.
“We can’t have 1.1 million people travelling to and from schools every day,” he told Newstalk.
