Fraction of 10k jabs for ‘at-risk’ cohorts done

ONLY a tiny fraction of the 10,000 planned vaccinations of those with underlying health conditions have been completed this week.

The HSE started the vaccination of those with high-risk underlying health conditions this week and it was estimated by HSE chief clinical officer Colm Henry that it would be possible to vaccinate 10,000 of the 160,000 patients in this cohort.

However, according to the most recent available data, only 627 in this cohort have been vaccinated so far. The most up to date figure is from Wednesday as the HSE was unable to provide the Irish

Mail on Sunday with a more recent update.

Patient advocate Stephen McMahon of the Irish Patients’ Association raised concerns over why the logistics of vaccinating high-risk patients was left until this week.

Dr Henry previously acknowledged that identifying individuals in this cohort would be a challenge.

He said: ‘It’s quite a tricky exercise for us, we don’t do a national disease registry in this country and the whole range of diseases covered renal disease, cancer, immunosuppression, heart disease, lung disease. We have to do the work, initially through the hospital systems, identifying as many of those patients as we can.’

Mr McMahon said there was no reason the lists of patients in this cohort couldn’t have been drawn up by doctors and consultants months ago.

He said: ‘I mean we knew six months ago that there was likely to be good candidates who need to be priortised for this vaccine. Why is it only being discussed this week?’

Following a reshuffling of the vaccine priority list, many people age 16 to 69 with conditions that put them at very high risk or high risk of severe Covid-19 disease will now be offered vaccination earlier than first planned.

For the purposes of vaccination prioritisation, those at ‘very high risk’ and those at ‘high risk’ are separate categories.

The group of people deemed to be at ‘very high risk’ of serious illness from Covid-19 is now the new Group 4 for vaccination. That means they are next in line for vaccination after people aged 70 years and older.

The group of people at ‘high risk’ of serious illness and who are aged 65 to 69 is now the new Group 5 for vaccination. Those who are at ‘high risk’ and aged 16 to 64 will be in Group 7 for vaccination.

When asked to comment on its progress in vaccinating high-risk patients, the HSE said: ‘The HSE has made a lot of progress in planning since the new Group 4 was announced.

‘However, given the complexity of the task we expect that it will take some weeks to contact and vaccinate everyone.’

‘Why is it only being discussed this week?’