Relaxation of Restrictions, Part XII *Read OP For Mod Warnings*

While the tone of the article is welcome, the use of that sort of image still suggests that the media want to protray the protests a being a group of anti vax nutters.

I was thinking the same...

Ah right. You think the new variant is just a ploy to encourage people to get a booster?

That poster doesn't give a toss about anyone else.

Sending vaccines to Africa would save far more lives than pumping them into kids in Ireland.

He/she will be safer when coming into contact with kids once they are vaccinated, who cares about poorer countries.

All in this together.

Ireland hasn't been taking it's excess supply of vaccines, some of these have been going to COVAX, however, for Africa specifically the issue has been more of logistics and hesitancy, the supply is now there for them but it will still be used very slow (and part of it is down to lack of threat from SARS-COV2 due to a lower average age). It makes no logistic sense for Ireland to send any of the vaccines we have in storage to Africa (there is a lot of bureaucracy around medicines as we saw when buying from Romania), they will be coming directly from the manufacturers instead. Africa doesn't just need vaccines, it needs supply chains to store and distribute them (and leaders to both encourage usage of them and not play politics with them, there has been a huge amount of waste because of this).

There is also multiple vaccines available that we aren't using, Novavax is now approved in Indonesia, India is producing it's own vaccines as is Cuba.

I'd really like to know what they're worried about, hospital numbers are falling, cases have stabilised, boosters continually being done, and a new variant that doesn't appear to be much concern based on early data.

Calm yourself down, as usual you jump to conclusions. Likely to be international travel related if anything in my opinion, such as PCR tests required etc. Let's wait and see before jumping to conclusions

Sorry part of it is due to a lack of threat due to average lower age but you want 5 Yr olds vaccinated in Ireland.

Vaccine hesitancy what is it 7% of the population vaccinated so how many have been offered a vaccine and declined it.

I'm not saying that, I'm saying that the vaccine supply coming to Ireland doesn't help the situation in Africa much unless we start supplying them with the logistics to manage the rollout as well. How much euro should we be putting into that effort?

Africa is getting it's own supply via COVAX (which we contribute to) and from the manufacturers directly, this doesn't mean Ireland should stop it's vaccine rollouts unless our plan is to remain in restrictions forever (or stop treating those vulnerable to SARS-COV2).

The African countries are less than 10% on average from what I have seen for being full vaxed.

From what I heard which i am happy to be corrected on and hopefully I am, the virus mutates in the unvaccinted, so us putting vaccines into kids while poor countries don't have access to vaccines makes it more likely for a more dangerous variant to grow.

When is the next review of measures, Feb 2022?

Sure, but both are happening at once, it's not like each booster/child vaccinated in Ireland means 1 less vaccinated in Africa, distribution of vaccines (distribution of anything) in Africa is tricky and isn't solved by just sticking our spares on a plane and flying them over (otherwise we'd be solving lots of other issues such as food and other basic medicines which are probably more valuable to them than vaccines).

What's the basis for a lockdown?