People will not get the choice of receiving one type of Covid-19 vaccine over another, HSE chief Paul Reid confirmed.
His warning came as the use of the AstraZeneca jab resumed after it was suspended for six days over concerns about blood clotting.
Thousands in the over-75 age category got their vaccine as the roll-out ramped up again in acute centres across the country.
HSE CEO Paul Reid said there will be no picking and choosing of jabs despite the differences between them.
He told Newstalk: “All vaccines are proven safe and effective and we’ll be administering the vaccines based on our plans.
“It has always been our plans across all of the population based on defined risks and that’s what we’ll continue to do.
“There will be no situation where there’s a choice of one vaccine over another.
“We’ll administer it based on the safety and effectiveness of all three vaccines that we have available to us.”
Speaking later on RTE radio he stressed the priority was to resume the programme for the 30,000 people who were due to receive it this week. He said the HSE wanted to restart the programme in “a safe way” and was conscious of vaccine hesitancy.
A further nine coronavirus-related deaths and 525 new cases were confirmed by the Department of Health last night.
It brings to 4,585 the death toll from the virus with 229,831 cases in Ireland to date.
As of 8am yesterday, there were 328 Covid-19 patients in hospital, 83 of them in ICU. There were 27 extra hospitalisations in the previous 24 hours.
Beaumont Hospital resumed use of the AstraZeneca jab yesterday along with the Pfizer Biontech vaccine.
John Donohue, a patient from Artane in Dublin, was one of the first to get his at 8:30am in Beaumont Hospital.
In a statement, the facility said 3,500 AstraZeneca jabs are scheduled for vulnerable patients and healthcare workers over this weekend and next week.
The chances of the very rare blood clotting that occurred in recipients of the vaccine in Norway and Germany have been calculated at “one in a million” by health experts.
Some GPs admitted there is still “huge concern” among patients about the AstraZeneca vaccine in spite of the ruling on its safety by the European Medicines Agency.
Cork-based Dr Paul O’Keeffe said he is glad he is using the Pfizer vaccine because at the moment AstraZeneca is a “tough sell” with the public.
He revealed: “We ran our second vaccine clinic today, and everybody was of the opinion, ‘Thank god it is the Pfizer’.”
