I agree wholeheartedly with the Deputy's ambition. It is exactly in line with what we are trying to do, namely, to get in as much vaccine as possible as early as possible and get it into people's arms straight away. That was what was agreed with the EU. The EU bought as much as it could. Every member state gets a per capita amount, so we get 1.11% of the total amount the EU could get. It is shared equally for each delivery each month. The figure I mentioned is the maximum amount the EU could get and we get a pro ra…

I have raised the Deputy's concern about the email address with the officials and asked that the response time be made shorter. On the issue of carers, I asked for a clinical judgment from the HSE, which I got in the past 48 hours, and it is as follows. Carers who work in the formal sector, that is, those who work for the HSE or for one of the private caring companies, are included in cohort 2. As for dentists, I can confirm they are included in cohort 2 as healthcare workers.

This week, the main focus is on long-term residential care settings. I think we are covering 367 or 369 individual nursing homes in this seven-day period. As of Sunday next, 69,000 front-line healthcare workers will have been vaccinated, as the Deputy noted. This week, 3,900 of them, or thereabouts, will get their second dose, while others will get their first dose. When we get to Sunday and the numbers are tallied up, it will not be exactly 70,000 and 70,000, but it will be broadly 50:50.

Absolutely. From my perspective, the more transparency, the better. We have made a real effort and I hope that has helped in some way. Members of the Oireachtas should be getting a daily briefing and there will be a biweekly one from me. We set up the email address to receive queries from party health spokespersons such as the Deputy and many others who are in the Chamber. We are trying and if there is more we can do, we will absolutely do it. I will seek to get as close as possible to what the Deputy has just requ…

I am receiving many of the same understandable questions. I have asked the HSE to produce a detailed note in the coming days on exactly this issue. At a high level, however, cohort 2 includes pharmacists and dentists. As I said earlier, the HSE has made a clinical position on carers, which is that carers in the formal sector, that is, carers who are employed as such, are also included in cohort 2. By Sunday, we will have hit a little under half of that group of front-line healthcare workers. There are 150,000 peopl…

The first place to look is the gov.ie website. The Deputy will see the vaccination protocol is there and the report from the national immunisation advisory committee, NIAC, was published as well. That is all there. The first level of key workers in the prioritisation are those who were involved in the vaccination programme. Many of them are covered in cohort 2, which are the front-line healthcare workers and, for example, people involved in supply chain logistics in moving the vaccines around. A lot of administrati…

I acknowledge that the Deputy raised the issue of the mental health nurses with me previously. It is one I will be raising with the task force and the HSE. The short answer is they are front-line healthcare workers. There is no question about that. It is just a question of when in the next few weeks they will receive the first dose, as it is for the GPs. I would like to make a point, which is there is no political involvement in how this wave is allocated between different front-line healthcare workers or from one …

All vaccinations are being recorded. There will be an electronic record for all vaccinations. Critically, when we have the wider roll-out, including to those over 70, for example, that will be electronic. On disinformation, I agree wholeheartedly with the Deputy and it is something we are taking seriously. In some good news, we got in new research on the public's view of the vaccines. I put the results of same out online yesterday or the day before. It is showing that we were starting from a pretty good position. A…

Residents will be vaccinated. One does not have to be a citizen. The vaccine is for anybody who is here. We are on target to have the nursing home residents and staff vaccinated. We set an ambitious target for this Sunday to have them all done or to have all of them done except for the outliers where there will be residents who, because they have Covid-19, cannot be vaccinated.

It is unfortunately a significant number but the target was always to do all the nursing homes, with an understanding that one cannot vaccinate those who have Covid-19. I am pretty comfortable saying that we are on target. There has been a great amount of work done to meet that. On family members, I disagree that it is an Irish thing. We are seeing reports from all around the place that this kind of incident is going on but it should not have happened.

The protocol was not put in place on 12 January. That was a secondary protocol. The protocol that was in place was the one that was agreed by the Government many weeks ago. A secondary nuanced protocol was not needed to know that one's family members are not front-line healthcare workers. That was clearly in place.

On sanctions, I am awaiting the report from the HSE on the settings other than the Coombe Women's Hospital. The board in the Coombe Women's Hospital is doing a thorough investigation and we need to give that space and see what happens. I fully agree with the Deputy on registration. There will be online registration but there will be many people who do not have online access. One of the ways we will be dealing with that in the first group, those over 70, is with direct GP contact. All of those over 70 have a GP visi…

In terms of the supply chain, there is much expertise involved in the national cold chain storage and the drug distribution network is being used. On whether we can get AstraZeneca ahead of the scheduled delivery, we are doing everything we can. The scheduled delivery is mid-February. We are looking for authorisation on 29 January and we are doing everything we can to see what we can do there. On Pfizer and the sixth dose, we had really good news. Apologies, I will get back to the other Deputies in writing. Can I a…

In my efforts to counter misinformation from Deputy MacSharry last week, I asked permission of the Leas-Cheann Comhairle in what was without a doubt an unacceptable and inappropriate way. It is certainly something that I sincerely regret. Given what I believe to be misinformation from Deputy MacSharry on something that is so important, I wonder would it be in order for me to give a brief response.

I thank the Deputy for his kind words on the medical cannabis access programme. I acknowledge that he has been at the forefront of this from day one, along with Deputy Aindrias Moynihan and others. It is good news. I look forward to going through the details of it with the Deputy and others. We are allocating a sizable amount of money. The programme existed before but, as the Deputy is all too well aware, it was not able to be rolled out because there was not an allocation for new drugs. That is being rectified and…

That is no problem at all. Ultimately governments are responsible for the decisions they make. That has to be the starting point. I have absolutely no doubt that in time there will be a full and thorough review of what happened. None of us would want the surge that we saw and the subsequent impact it had on the hospitals, ICU and so forth. Had we or anybody known then what is known now about the prevalence of the UK variant, as well as potentially the South African variant, the public health advice would have been …

I thank the Deputy very much for the questions. Yes, those in the formal carer sector are included as front-line healthcare workers. For example, the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, spoke about this exact group of people being vaccinated in Waterford. They are included. The clinical guidance on this is that those in the formal sector are included as front-line healthcare workers. With regard to dialysis, a similar question is being raised, very understandably, by other Deputies, and it is coming to me and, I am s…

I thank the Deputy for his question. With regard to dentists, I am happy to confirm they are included in cohort 2. I have spoken directly to their professional body and have stated it publicly on several occasions. If they do not know, we will do everything we can to let them know. Communications have issued but we can always do more. With regard to carers, it is a clinical decision based on the prioritisation from NIAC, which is the expert group, that those in the formal sector who are employed as carers are cover…

I am happy to provide the Deputy with a note on that but it is changing, sometimes daily. For example, in recent days we got about 24 hours notice that this week's delivery of the Pfizer vaccine, instead of being about 40,000 would be 20,000. As we are getting a sixth dose, we are getting an agreed amount of vials that give 40,000 doses, but we are getting much more out of them. That is new. The reduction for this week is new. I am happy to provide the Deputy with what we have but would make the point that the big …

These details are being worked out right now, not only in Ireland but with the company through the Commission with every member state. I can give the broad figures for the end of March, because the day-to-day and week-to-week figures move a great deal. The plan is that we will have approximately 1.4 million doses in the country, about 600,000 would be AstraZeneca and the majority of the rest would be Pfizer BioNTech and the rest would be Moderna.