HSE says it’s ‘realistic’ to expect Ireland to start vaccination program in early January

HSE CEO PAUL Reid has said it is “realistic” that Ireland can start its vaccination program in early January.

He said the timing for the launch of the vaccination has become much clearer this week with announcements from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) that two vaccine developers, Pfizer / BioNTech ad Moderna, had submitted marketing authorization applications. conditional (CMA).

An extraordinary emergency meeting regarding the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine will be held no later than December 29 and a similar meeting regarding the Moderna vaccination will take place on January 12.

“Based on these dates, and everything is going well according to that plan, it is realistic to expect that Ireland will start its vaccination program in the first days of January 2021 and that is certainly the plan that we are working on,” said Reid. . .

He said the news had given HSE and its front-line workers “a great level of hope” for 2021.

The Covid-19 vaccine task force, of which Reid is a member, met again this week to continue its work on a strategy for the deployment of the vaccine. He said the task force is “on its way” to deliver its strategy to the government by December 11.

The strategy covers the entire process, including supply chain and logistics, workforce, enabling technology to record and track which vaccines were administered and to whom, monitoring effectiveness, and managing program communications.

The European Commission has agreed advance purchase agreements with six vaccine developers and Ireland will have the capacity to purchase almost 16 million doses of vaccines.

“Although there will be no shortage of doses of the vaccines, they will arrive over an extended period of time, which will require a sequencing or prioritization process, which is currently being finalized through the working group,” Reid explained.

“As you know, different vaccines have different temperature storage requirements, the particular Pfizer vaccine must be stored at minus 75 degrees, followed by local transportation arrangements between two and eight degrees.

“The key requirement in our preparation for the vaccination program has been the acquisition, we received this week nine ultra-low temperature freezers on December 1.”

He said that each of those nine freezers can store about 200,000 doses of vaccine and that there is already a cold storage facility at Citywest that was acquired several years ago.

Reid said he wanted to emphasize that the vaccine “will not be our first line of defense for now or for some time.”

“It’s a huge boost and a big part of our defense, but it will be some time before it’s the main line of defense. The high risk and concern for us from an HSE perspective is that the public perceives it that way and we lose the great basic principles of what has been done so well throughout 2020.

“So it’s key that we stick to the basics, doing the simple things that work well and all the individual public health measures.”