Family carers are frontline healthcare workers and need to be treated as such in the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine, the Sinn Féin leader has said.
Mary Lou McDonald said it was “absolutely essential” that the country’s 500,000 family carers are given priority on the list when it is reconfigured by the Department of Health.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin told the Dáil that Health Minister Stephen Donnelly had written to the National Immunization Advisory Committee (NIAC) about the matter and that the Government expected to receive updated advice on Wednesday.
Ms McDonald said: “Family carers are frontline health workers and they deserve to be recognized as such.
“Carers employed by the HSE are included in the rollout and it only makes sense that family carers are given their place too.
“Family carers have been prioritized for vaccination in the North and it is high time we follow suit.”
She added that family carers had walked a “particularly hard road” during the pandemic.
“I held a meeting with hundreds of them last week and they told me that the prospect of the vaccine is the light at the end of a very, very dark tunnel,” she said.
“They said it was like a punch in the stomach to be told that they would have to wait to be vaccinated along with the general population.
“They feel their lives and the clear risks that they face don’t matter.”
In response Mr Martin said he recognized that carers had to be “extremely careful” in their lives so that they do not inadvertently spread the disease to their loved ones.
Mr Martin also told the Dáil that approval of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine “may be sooner than was originally envisaged” and that it would give everyone “considerable hope”.
Ms McDonald said the risk carers face is “enormous” and it was unacceptable that they had been “forgotten” and left with the general population for vaccination.
“The NIAC is wrong to have left family carers in that position,” she said.
The Taoiseach dismissed Ms McDonald’s claims that carers had been forgotten.
“Nobody in here wants to forget anyone in terms of vaccination,” he said.
“The Government’s plan is to vaccinate as many people as quickly as we possibly can dependent on getting the requisite volume of vaccine into the country.
“That’s our objective like everybody else’s.
“We’re not forgetting anyone when it comes to vaccination.
“I don’t think that charge should be made.”