Thread by @SineadOCarroll

In Dec, I was really surprised how the UK struggled to publish vaccination numbers. It was described there as such an 'own goal' because they were actually doing well.

Some details in this piece (which luckily hasn't come to pass): news.sky.com/story/covid-19…

I mentioned yesterday on @RadioBrendanRTE that I hope we learn from the UK system - its failures and successes - but we are now in our own 'own goal' territory now by not publishing the figures from the first two weeks.

Publication isn't due until Thursday.

On radio, @paulreiddublin has given numbers so we have been told that 35k were done last week. And we know from individual hospitals that there are some good news stories out there.

But the official vacuum is leading to misinformation like this.

There *were* vaccinations given throughout the weekend and some hospitals even finished... see here:

https://twitter.com/emerward/status/1348322614339637249

But as we've been saying all pandemic, transparency is key. This might all just be a week-long story and we get all the data we could possibly want on Thurs... (we have been asking every day, btw, just in case)

But the bigger lesson for me is that we should be able to avoid the pitfalls that have just happened in the UK. Could we be having more conversations? Sharing more lessons? Even just keeping an eye and avoiding at all costs the problems (even if just optical).

We'll be diving into the data on Thursday, as always with @ConalThomas (here's last week's example: thejournal.ie/what-does-this…)