Public health advice ‘not God’ but needs to be respected, Taoiseach tells Seanad

Taoiseach Micheál Martin has pointed towards a widespread roll out of antigen testing but warned again that it is not a ‘silver bullet’.

In his first address to the Seanad as Taoiseach Mr Martin said the “centrality of public health advice is not God but it does need to be respected”.

When the pandemic started all parties were agreed that public health had to be at the centre of the country’s response, he said.

Emphasising the need for respect for public health experts and "the central edifice" of their advice, he told Senators people can have confidence in the vaccination programme not because of politicians but because it is based on scientific evidence from the National Immunisation Advisory Committee (Niac) and the advice of the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet).

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“We can have 101 opinions in society but if you don’t have a central pillar and edifice to get us through this we’ll end up dividing all over the place.”

He added: “That doesn’t mean that centrality of public health advice is God but it does have to be respected.”

Outlining the steps for the rollout of antigen testing Mr Martin said 3,000 people a day are receiving antigen tests in line with public health policy on close contacts.

“About half a million tests have been distributed across all sectors and 100,000 tests have been used by the Department of Agriculture in meat plants alone.”

He emphasised the significance of the widespread roll out of antigen testing but stressed “it’s not the silver bullet by any means”.

Antigen tests are being deployed in third level colleges and will be rolled out in other education and childcare settings, he confirmed.

There is also “the HSE’s antigen results portal because they want people to feed in the results as they do the antigen testing”.

“We will be providing a wider distribution of antigen testing across society.”

“It’s just a supplemental tool,” he said, however. “The PCR test remains the gold standard and we did about 196,000 PCR were conducted in the last seven days.”

he also acknowledged that “public health chiefs have concerns about the widespread use of antigen testing”.

Mr Martin repeated his support for its increased use but said “there is concern about the usage of it in a proper way, in terms of doing it when you’re asymptomatic.

“Evidence in the research is showing that a lot of people are not using it in the most optimum way.”

Defending Niac, which had been criticised over its response to calls for a widespread booster campaign, the Taoiseach said: “It’s an independent scientific body and that’s crucial for the doctors and medical professionals who administer the vaccine because they’re not going to do it on the whim of a political order or edict but they will do it when they have authorisation of their peers.”

He said “we may be impatient and want faster outcomes but what gives the vaccination programme ultimately the confidence people have in it is that it’s not politicians deciding we want people to get vaccinated because we think it works and off you go”.

“All of us as politicians can get frustrated. We have our views. We can look at a situation and say ‘they should do that, they should do this’. But we should be careful also to protect the edifice…..the different layers of decision making that has protected us from the outset of the pandemic,” he said.

Seanad leader and Fine Gael Senator Regina Doherty said antigen testing had a particular place and "the paternalistic language being used by some of our public health advisers just isn't going down well".

She called for a “political decision to roll it (antigen testing) out for all”.

Independent Senator Sharon Keogan said such testing had been in widespread use in other jurisdictions for the past 12 months but it was treated like "snake oil" in Ireland.