Swine flu vaccination plan to take months

IT COULD take from six to eight months to vaccinate the entire population for swine flu, Minister for Health Mary Harney told the Dáil.

She said a typical HSE vaccination clinic would comprise at least one doctor, six nurses and appropriate support staff. “It will have the capacity to vaccinate up to 500 people daily, but the numbers vaccinated at the clinics will clearly depend on the demand from the public for the service.’’

She said staff being assigned to the vaccination clinics would not be replaced and the programme would, therefore, mean that some other services had to be delayed or curtailed.

Fine Gael spokesman Dr James Reilly said almost 10,000 people contracted the swine flu weekly. However, that did not take into account the people who did not attend their GP and therefore the figure might be more like 30,000.

He said hundreds of at-risk patients had to be turned away because vaccine supplies had run out or were not delivered. One-third of the HSE vaccine clinics remained unopened, and some at-risk patients faced up to a 250km round trip to a clinic.

Ms Harney said it was a pandemic and every country faced the same logistical challenges. The department anticipated 415,000 people were at risk, and general practices would get that number of vaccines.