Covid-19: HSE moves to ramp up booster vaccine capacity amid Omicron threat

The HSE is working to increase its ability to provide more Covid-19 vaccine boosters more quickly to better protect people against the threat from the Omicron variant.

The Department of Health on Thursday night said five further cases of the strain, first identified in South Africa, had been detected in the State, bringing the total to date to six.

"Although this is a new variant, our early understanding gives us confidence that a booster dose of Covid-19 vaccine will offer good protection against Omicron and Delta infection," said chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan.

HSE chief executive Paul Reid on Thursday told a media briefing that he expected the Omicron variant to become "more dominant" but the timing of this was "unknown".

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“We expect it is only a matter of time before we are looking at significant numbers of cases of Omicron,” he said.

Mr Reid said there was uncertainty about what effect Omicron would have on hospital admissions heading into the Christmas period, with Covid-19 cases already at high levels.

He said the health service was planning to bring more people through the booster programme more quickly due to concerns about the variant.

Oversubscribed clinics

As booster doses were offered to people in their 50s for the first time on Thursday, Taoiseach Micheál Martin apologised for the inconvenience and “mix-up” caused to hundreds of people who were turned away from an oversubscribed walk-in clinic at UCD in Dublin.

He said “the intended motivation is a simple one, to get as many people vaccinated as we possibly can”.

The HSE said that while it did not want to see people queueing for excessive periods, walk-in clinics were the best way to vaccinate as many people as possible with booster doses.

Damien McCallion, the HSE’s lead on vaccinations, said the organisation would look at how it could “smarten up and improve” how it administers boosters for walk-ins at vaccination clinics.

He said the HSE planned to continue recruiting more vaccinators and would look at operating longer walk-in periods, but that it also had to accommodate large groups of people at the same time and balance booster appointments for certain groups along with walk-ins.

This made the booster rollout “more complex” than the initial vaccination rollout earlier this year.

Apologised

He apologised to people affected by receiving multiple appointments for boosters, resulting from a time lag of at least 24 hours in details of boosters given by GPs being received by the HSE.

The HSE has updated its text message system to allow people infected with Covid-19 to reject a booster appointment as they cannot receive an additional dose for six months post-infection.

Marco Cavaleri, the European Medicines Agency’s head of vaccine strategy, yesterday said the latest data supported “safe and effective administration” of a booster three months after a second dose.

The State currently administers boosters to people five months after their second Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca doses and three months after their single Janssen jab.