How your Mail on Sunday leads the way

THE HSE’s booster campaign came into its own this week – with thousands of people queuing to receive their third dose of the Covid vaccine each day, putting paid to the myth of supposed hesitancy that health chiefs have spoken about over the past weeks.

Since last April, this newspaper has been highlighting the need for booster vaccines to compensate for immunity which at that stage was only ever likely to be of six months duration.

The confirmation of 22 million vaccines in August seemed to confirm that a booster campaign was next on the agenda after the successful primary vaccination rollout. At that stage, head of the vaccine taskforce Brian MacCraith said: ‘Israel has already commenced its booster campaign to good effect. France and Germany have indicated that they will commence shortly. And we’re awaiting formal guidance from the National Immunisation Advisory Committee.’

In October, the MoS began to campaign for a swifter rollout of a booster campaign highlighting NIAC’s delays in decision-making around boosters, particularly for healthcare workers. We spoke to the first healthcare worker to receive the vaccine in Ireland, Clinical Nurse Manager in St James’s Hospital Bernie Waterhouse. She spoke of how her staff were falling ill with Covid and highlighted the immediate need for boosters for healthcare workers. At that stage, 10 months after she had been vaccinated, she had still not been boosted. Boosters for healthcare workers were approved within days.

Throughout November we continued to highlight the public’s desire for boosters, rather than restrictions, and the shortage of staff that was plaguing the ability of the booster campaign to ramp up. One vaccine centre worker said:

‘We still have the infrastructural capacity, we retained the centres, we made sure to retain that, but we do not have the staff. They have simply left.’

At the start of December we revealed that 90% of 50-69 year olds were eligible for a booster, despite claims from the HSE that individual eligibility was the key issue dictating the slow pace of the rollout. Eventually, the arrival of the Omicron variant put fresh impetus into the booster campaign, with the welcome news this week that younger cohorts and those who received Janssen are to be offered a third jab by January 10.