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People who receive the Covid-19 vaccine will be given “evidence” that they have had it, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar al Dáil said Thursday.
Varadkar said that the first people in Ireland will receive the Covid-19 vaccine before the end of the year. However, he said he could not confirm the exact dates for people to receive the vaccine “but we hope that the first people in Ireland are vaccinated before the new year.
He told Labor leader Alan Kelly that “they will be given evidence of the fact that they have the vaccine, but I can’t tell you exactly in what form.”
Kelly said there were “huge moral, legal and ethical issues” involved in certification and whether these would be necessary for people wanting to attend large events.
Earlier, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced that vaccinations would begin in the European Union on December 27.
“On December 27, 28 and 29 vaccination will begin throughout the EU,” he wrote on Twitter. “It is time for Europe.”
The approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is expected to be completed before Christmas after the European Medicines Agency moved forward the date of a key meeting.
Moderna is expected to approve a second vaccine in early January.
The EU had hoped to coordinate vaccinations to start simultaneously across the bloc, but some countries are able to organize the deployment more quickly than others.
The chair of Ireland’s Covid-19 vaccine task force, Professor MacCraith, confirmed on Wednesday that the current expectation is that several “carriers” of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine would arrive in the state before the end of the year, each with about 5,000 doses.
While he said there was no “absolute confirmation” on the numbers, when pressed by Sinn Féin health spokesman David Cullinane, he said that before the end of the calendar year “small multiples” of that number are expected to be delivered. number.
“If you take those 4,875 (doses) per sender, we would expect a small number of senders. It can be one, it can be two. We do not know exactly that yet, it has not been confirmed ”.
Professor MacCraith told the committee that they had no firm information beyond that a small number of vaccines are likely to be delivered before the end of December.
He said nursing home residents and staff could be vaccinated in mid to late February, based on a tentative model.
Professor MacCraith told the Oireachtas health committee that while this was not a target or target modeling of different vaccine arrival rates had been done, the staff available to administer the vaccines and the number of people in settings residential care in the state, a category that includes nursing homes.
He said there are nearly 600 such facilities in the country, with some 78,000 residents and staff living within them.
“If you look at those numbers, and you look at that initial cohort of vaccinators, you can start to think that that cohort might complete their vaccinations in mid to late February, for example,” Colm Burke told Fine Gael TD, emphasizing that this to turn would depend on the number of vaccines that arrive.
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