Chairperson of the High-Level Task Force on Covid-19 Brian MacCraith says that he hopes much of the Irish population will receive the vaccination by August 2021.
He spoke to Morning Ireland on RTÉ Radio1, explaining that they can predict one positive scenario where 530,000 vaccines will be administered per week by the summer.
He said:
“It’ll be down to the dates of approval, the manufacturing success of the companies themselves, the delivery schedules. What I can say this, we’ve looked out right into summer, midsummer. We can predict in one fairly positive scenario that we’d be looking at, say the month of August, over two million doses of vaccines arriving at a rate on average of about 530,000 vaccines per week and we’ll be ready to deploy those vaccines.
“I think certainly if all things come to pass that are in that model in terms of expected approval dates, and expected delivery schedules, one would be looking at that stage of being very close, or at the point of closing out the actual vaccination of as much of the population of Ireland that want to receive vaccines.”
He added, “So we’re looking about 75% of the population, 3.75 million. And if you say that’s two doses per person, that’s 7.5million vaccine doses, so that’s the sort of number we have to use in our calculations.”
A 79-year-old woman from The Liberties will become the first person to receive the vaccine today.
Annie is a grandmother of ten and will be administered the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine at St James’s Hospital later today.
The rollout of the vaccine officially begins today and will be administered in four hospitals around the country: Beaumont and St James’s hospitals in Dublin, Cork University Hospital, and University Hospital Galway.
Brian MacCraith also said it’s “very possible we will complete all vaccinations of nursing homes by February.”
READ NEXT: The first Covid vaccine will be given today: Here’s the planned rollout
