A dedicated vaccine minister would clear up insane confusion over rollout in one shot

ANYONE who knows someone over 80 who has been vaccinated against Covid-19 knows that the gap between the first and second doses is four weeks at most. Because of this, we probably have also assumed that this gap is standard for all the vaccines currently available.

This, it has now emerged, is not the case. It holds true for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, which until this week were the only ones sanctioned for use among people over 70.

Younger frontline workers have been receiving the OxfordAstraZeneca vaccine, though, and have been advised their follow-up appointment is 12 weeks hence.

As the HSE told this newspaper last week: ‘Two doses of Covid-19 vaccine AstraZeneca are required with an interval of 12 weeks between doses as a higher efficacy after the second dose was found if the booster dose was given at 12 weeks.’

All good, so. Well, yes, but those in charge of our vaccine rollout seem to be confused.

On Thursday, Richard Bruton suggested stretching the interval between first and second vaccine doses could increase first doses by 40%.

At that point, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly might easily have intervened and articulated the HSE policy on AstraZeneca. Instead he said if changes were reccomended to the interval between jabs, including AstraZeneca, his department would look at it.

The next day, The National Immunisation Advisory Committee’s (NIAC) Professor Karina Butler said that given the shortfall in supply, the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has been in short supply as a result of its makers under-providing to Ireland and other countries, was being reccommended for a delay ‘between eight and 12 weeks’ - and closer to 12 preferably. She suggested this could help with supply - even though it could not.

Just what is going on? It’s not clear that our Cabinet members or vaccine chiefs are in any way in control of perhaps the most important public health intervention in the history of the State. The HSE has been administering the doses at an interval of 12 weeks since the drug was approved for use in this country. The fact that neither the health minister nor the NIAC were on top of this HSE operational decision, beggars belief and calls into question the entire vaccine rollout operation.

Every projection, every model, the HSE has rolled out was clearly based on that 12-week gap, so assertions that more people might be vaccinated was fundamentally flawed. There can be no net gain.

Separately, we report this week that Cabinet sources are critical of the performance of the leaders of our vaccine response, Micheál Martin and Stephen Donnelly.

The criticism is mostly of communication. They need to be seen to be managing it better. Waffle simply won’t cut it.

If the NIAC is unaware of such a crucial HSE operational decision, that is an issue for the Department of Health. The Department of Health needs to step up to its responsibilities.

It once more suggests, as this paper has said before, that the only solution to this continued mismanagement of the crisis is a dedicated vaccine minister.