Government plans to meet their June jabs deadline of vaccinating four out of five people has gone from confident to “hopeful” after the latest vaccine supply chain shocks.
And Taoiseach Micheál Martin has admitted there will be more “bumps along the way” if we are to make it, while predicting we are still on track.
Ministers were left reeling this morning as they headed into a crunch Cabinet meeting after learning up to one million AstraZeneca and Janssen jabs this quarter will be delayed.
This would have had a huge impact on the predicted total of 3.9million vaccines that were due here by July, on which the 80% of adults receiving one dose each by the end of June target is based.
However, the Cabinet was saved a terrible day after a surprise announcement from Pfizer that they will be delivering an extra 50million of their jabs to the EU before the end of June.
One minister told the Irish Mirror it was “a massive relief” when the news came through right in the middle of their meeting.
Ireland will be entitled to a pro-rata supply of just under 550,000 from this new batch.
But there is still a huge degree of uncertainty that the June deadline will be met.
The Government Press Secretary told reporters at the weekly Cabinet meeting briefing that there was still “hope” targets could be met, and that “it may be” that we could get back on track.
The Taoiseach said while there would be problems, the “agile” nature of the plan would see the Government hit its mark.
In the meantime there will be a lot of what Government officials described last night as “number crunching” to be done by the HSE to get a new vaccine schedule sorted out.
The Government spokesman said: “There’s still hope that this vaccine programme can stay on track.”
He added: “We have to let the experts, who know what they’re doing, go through that.
“It may be that everything is fine and that we’re still on track, but I don’t want to say definitively that we’re not, but there’s a lot of hope and a lot of confidence that there still is going to be rapid vaccine rollout going into April, May and June and significant numbers are going to be achieved.”
The Taoiseach said: “there will be bumps along the way, but the key point is that our programme is agile and is responsive, and we’re very determined to go at this as effectively as we can.
“And again we received this morning clear assurances from the HSE that 95% of what we have we will get out there on a weekly basis.”
