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The first shipment of the Pfizer / BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine has arrived in the Republic.
Health Minister Stephen Donnelly tweeted on Saturday: “When is a fridge worth photographing? When he has just received the first #Covid vaccines from Ireland ”.
Donnelly said the country would begin vaccinating on Wednesday, December 30. Frontline healthcare workers and nursing home residents will be vaccinated first.
Pfizer vaccine must be stored at temperatures well below freezing. The HSE has sent several ultra-low temperature freezers to the National Cold Chain Center to keep the hits going.
Earlier, Paul Reid, HSE CEO, said it was a “momentous day” when he tweeted that he was “on his way to receiving the first delivery of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine for HSE.”
The first batch was expected to contain 10,000 doses of the jab.
The next shipment, in the tens of thousands of doses, is due in the first week of January and will be followed by similar shipments every week after, Donnelly said Tuesday.
When is it worth photographing a fridge? When you just had the first from Ireland # COVID-19 vaccines given it
The first doses have just arrived and many of them are in that very, very cold refrigerator.
We will start getting vaccinated in four days. #firm hold. pic.twitter.com/T9zletiOBS
– Stephen Donnelly (@DonnellyStephen)
December 26, 2020
The HSE anticipates that 30,000 nursing home residents will be vaccinated by the end of January, having received the required two doses.
After front-line healthcare workers and nursing home residents are vaccinated, people over the age of 70; other health workers who are not in direct contact with the patient, people aged 65 to 69 and other “key workers” will be vaccinated in that order.
This will be followed by people ages 18 to 64 with certain medical conditions; who are residents of long-term care facilities and who live or work in crowded environments.
The next to be immunized will be key workers in essential jobs that cannot avoid a high risk of exposure; people who work in education, people between 55 and 64 years old, other workers in occupations important to the functioning of society and people between 18 and 54 years old.
However, Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said that mass inoculation against Covid-19 is unlikely to be possible until May or June, as the vaccine will not be available in sufficient quantities until then.
Mr. Martin said that normal life will not return until the summer at the earliest and that the return to normalcy will be “tentative.”
“I think the first six months of 2021 will see improvements, but we certainly will not be normal in the first six months as we knew it,” he said in Government Buildings.
Martin said that the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, had informed the leaders of the European Union that the manufacture of vaccines “will certainly increase. [in] March onwards and she would have identified May-June as critical months in terms of high volumes of vaccines arriving ”.
He said expected vaccine volumes in January and February were “relatively low in terms of what was to come later. But that’s where we will deal with nursing home residents, healthcare workers, and key workers. . . that will make a significant difference in itself. If we can immunize and protect the most vulnerable, that already begins to give us greater freedom in terms of political options and decisions we make.
On Christmas Day, the National Public Health Emergency Team reported 1,025 new confirmed cases of the disease, bringing the total number of cases in the Republic to 84,098. The last time the number exceeded 1,000 was on October 25.
The team also reported two other deaths of Covid-19 patients. This brings the total number of deaths in the pandemic to 2,194.
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