'Good reason to believe' NI will achieve 90% vaccine uptake

Northern Ireland is on track to reach 90% vaccine uptake.

According to the head of the vaccination programme here, 'there is good reason to believe' that will be attained.

Patricia Donnelly briefed the Health Committee about the progress of the rollout so far.

On Thursday Mrs Donnelly told MLAs there has been a strong will among the population to get vaccinated: "We've achieved a lot to date but we are always concerned about what more we have to do.

"We have several hundred thousand more people, we're not giving up on any of the age groups, we're still trying to target 90% uptake and we have good reason to believe that that will be achieved."

The latest vaccine dashboard statistics show In Northern Ireland there have been 1,397,087 total doses of jabs administered, 950,778 of those have been first doses and 446,309 second doses.

Patricia told MLAs about the breakdown of those among the different age groups: "We're rapidly approaching a point where half of those who have been vaccinated have been fully vaccinated and that is also very reassuring given that most of those will be in the most vulnerable groups.

"Overall, we've now vaccinated 65% of the adult population.

"We've worked down through the age groups...we've got 100% of the 80-year-old plus, this has been a significant achievement to get that, for a long time we were running about 96% but we've now vaccinated over 7000 of the housebound.

"50-59s we're still booking on, 85% of them and we're actively booking the 40-49."

She added: "We have opened it to the 30-39 year-olds and we have just over 100,000 of them vaccinated to date which represents 41%.

"We've not yet opened it tot he under 30s, we will be going to this group next but it will take some weeks."

And she also revealed a Covid-19 winter booster jab could be delivered by GPs in Northern Ireland alongside the winter flu campaign.

It comes as the UK vaccines Minister minister said there should be a pool of coronavirus boosters available by September.

The government's preparing a new campaign to protect against variants this autumn.

Several options are being pursued, including the possibility of mixing jabs compared to what someone originally received.

Mrs Donnelly said guidance would come from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation but that options are actively being discussed in Northern Ireland:

"What we're hoping from JCVI is that when they give the advice on the booster, who will get it - it may not be a total population, it will be a single dose.

"We hope that they will take into consideration the winter flu programme, which is delivered by GPs, they deliver 480,000 vaccinations every year, almost unseen.

"It has not disrupted their normal practices so we would hope that JCVI will come forward with a recommendation that will allow us to combine those so that it is much more effective and GPs would be keen on that and indeed we discussed it last night at a meeting."