Revealed: How the horse had bolted by the time HSE closed off health workers loophole

It’s been a week since the HSE declared that vaccinations for cohort two – frontline healthcare workers – had been closed off.

The decision came after a series of stories revealing that staff within the organisation, many of whom are working from home, had been vaccinated out of turn.

Finance staff in Offaly, payroll workers in Galway, the pensions department in Cork, administration staff in Limerick, people on career breaks, staff who had retired – the list went on. Against this backdrop of rank-and-file vaccine queue jumping within the HSE administrative arm, other high-profile examples of the practice emerged in hospitals.

In the Coombe hospital, a consultant took leftover Covid-19 vaccines home to administer to family members. Meanwhile, it emerged that the CEO of the Beacon hospital had given leftover vaccines to teachers from a private school.

By the time the HSE finally called stop last Friday, more than 200,000 first doses had been pumped into cohort two, which includes “frontline workers” in both the HSE and private sector. The figures alone have raised eyebrows.

According to the HSE, it has more than 67,000 direct employees, and a further 35,000 employed by agencies funded by the HSE.

Only a proportion of that 100,000-plus number are frontline staff. Even taking into account frontline workers in the private and voluntary sector, the numbers of “frontline healthcare workers” (237,802 as of yesterday) who have had at least one dose would appear to be high.

Meanwhile, GPs around the country were receiving what one described as “lucky dip” deliveries of vaccine. Reductions in promised supplies saw clinics cancelled, elderly and vulnerable people left waiting for the protection the vaccine brings.

People in Cohort 4, many of whom have been shielding for more than a year, were being passed from pillar to post as they contacted GPs and hospitals enquiring about who would be giving them a vaccine and when.

Along the way, the HSE response to the many stories of queue jumping has been the same – there are strict guidelines in place regarding sequencing and examples of “opportunistic” vaccinations have occurred to avoid wastage. According to Paul Reid, “very marginal numbers have cheated the vaccine system”.

While cohort two was being worked through, the HSE guidelines allocated priority to those who were most at risk from exposure to the virus. Now that the cohort has been closed off, and questions linger over exactly how many people were coded within that group when they should have waited their turn, the allocation of vaccines to the wider public has changed.

On Wednesday, it was announced that once everyone aged over 70, those with underlying health conditions and vulnerable groups are vaccinated, people will begin to receive vaccines on the basis of age.

Under the provisional groups before this change, the roll-out progressed by job category such as essential workers and ‘people in occupations important to the functioning of society’, alongside age categories.

The change has been criticised by various groups, including the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors which said it shows a “scant regard for the unique and high-risk job that gardaí do”.

The Irish National Teachers’ Organisation said that the change abandons “carefully considered priority groups who are working on the frontline”.

This week, the HSE told this newspaper that it “would be hard to quantify” how many non-patient-facing healthcare staff have jumped ahead of sequence in the vaccine roll-out. It is understood that staff were able to access appointments via the HSE portal by signing up under sequence 2g. This is for “all other healthcare workers without direct patient care but working in a healthcare facility with the potential to meet patients/service users”.

Many of them, like Tom*, in fact fall under cohort six, which includes those “providing essential health services, for example, management and administration”.

The HSE told the Irish Independent that it “would be hard to quantify” how many had been vaccinated ahead of schedule as “it would require a person by person analysis of 2g including those from private and other settings to ascertain if people had incorrectly registered”.

Perhaps the only way to measure just how many non-patient-facing staff have been hoovered up in cohort six would have came when, under the original allocation sequencing, registration for cohort six came to pass.

This revised vaccine prioritisation list, recommended by the National Immunisation Advisory Committee, makes no reference or mention of healthcare workers after cohort two.

Instead “key workers essential to the vaccine programme” now fall under cohort six.

There is an argument that the number of healthcare workers who would have originally been vaccinated under this cohort may have been substantially lower than expected, given the evidence that suggests so many are already protected.

Any that remain will now simply be vaccinated according to age.

Yes, the staff in HSE roles who fell under cohort six have a right to be vaccinated, but not ahead of the elderly people in their 70s, or those in cohort four with serious medical conditions that put them more at risk of sever outcomes or death from Covid-19.

Someone working at home, who does not have patient contact, should not have the privilege of being protected at the expense of the most vulnerable.

By the same token, the CEO of a private hospital should not have given vaccines to teachers in a private school while sick patients attending the same hospital were left wanting.

Had the country been awash with vaccines, the disparity might not have been as acutely felt.

However, as the HSE has so often reminded us, supply has been the only limiting factor in the roll-out to date. Once vaccines arrive, they are sent out to the various vaccination centres and administered within days.

Indeed, perhaps in the rush to get vaccines into arms and push the numbers on the Covid-19 vaccination dashboard up, scrutiny around which arms they were going into was less of a concern.

* Tom’s name has been changed to protect his identity.

Irish Independent