Hospitals must not get free pass when it comes to distributing any leftover vaccines

OUTRAGE is a devalued word. In our world, it happens along every day, with little respect for the degree of the offence and applied equally to the fudged ending of a TV series and a genuine calamity.

Occasionally, though, it unites us when we are faced with something so brutally inequitable, so clearly wrong. Genuine outrage is the only valid response.

So it proved on Friday, when our sister paper the Irish Daily Mail revealed an almost unbelievable tale. According to the private Beacon Hospital in Dublin, due to double-booking of vaccinations for healthcare workers, it found itself with 20 doses of the AstraZeneca shot left over.

One might assume that all 20 could have been delivered on the wards to those enduring or recovering from cancer, to those with existing respiratory conditions who would struggle to fight Covid infection, or to those with long-term illnesses such as diabetes, asthma or cystic fibrosis.

Failing that, one might imagine these doses would be offered to the immediate community – to teachers in local schools, to fulltime carers minding elderly parents, to children living with disability and compelled to attend school in person.

Instead, they were injected into the arms of teachers in St Gerard’s, a private school attended by the children of the chief executive of the hospital.

Let us be clear. Teachers should be much higher up the tiers of those to be vaccinated, but in a democracy, there also must be a protocol that is transparent, a hierarchy that is understood and seen to be administered.

In the normal world, we accept there are tiers of privilege. Some can afford to send their children to the best schools and to pay for gold-plated health insurance plans. That’s capitalism. Over the past year, though, we have lived by one mantra – we have, for a year now, been told we all are in this together. Covid, we believed, was the great leveller. A pathogen has no respect for your bank balance, and those most deserving, from whatever social stratum, would be vaccinated first.

Instead, as this newspaper revealed, healthcare workers who were non-patient facing, were vaccinated out of turn at the Mater. In the Coombe, family members of that hospital’s master also received the jab.

This cannot be at the discretion of individuals. It is time a clear list was built, a list of those most in need if and when surplus vaccines are available. There must be thousands living within a phone call of every hospital in Ireland who could get there in minutes to receive a vaccination.

It is far from likely that the Beacon, the Mater and the Coombe are outliers, and much more believable that, every day, hospitals somewhere in this country are ignoring the protocols and injecting the vaccine into the arms of people known to them, people who, should they contract Covid, are young enough to experience mild symptoms or to recover easily from more serious ones.

They are doing this at the expense of others who would struggle to cope, who might need ventilation and who, sadly, might die.

So, yes, the fact the word is overused, overcooked and bordering on hackneyed at this stage, is irrelevant. What happened this week was disgraceful – and profoundly worthy of our outrage.