Thread by @KarlBrophy

Targets:

Last week - 100,000 (Missed by 18,000).

This week - 92,000 (Will be missed by a lot, apparently).

Next week - 84,000

https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1367802815020740609

On the 23rd February, just 10 days ago, @MichealMartinTD told us that we would administer 1.25 million vaccines “by the end of March”.

merrionstreet.ie/en/news-room/s…

We'll hit 500,000 this week apparently and, now, plan to be at around 585,000 by Sunday March 14th.

This means that we'll have to administer 665,000 doses over the last 16 days of March.

That works out at 41,500 doses a day.

We're told that we're going to "ramp up" to 250,000 vaccines per week in April and May.

But if we're going to hit the number the Taoiseach told us we were going to hit (just 10 days ago) we'll actually have to slow down in April and May.

Because, apparently, we're going to go at a rate of 280,000 doses a week for the last two and a bit weeks of this month.

Put it another way, we're being asked to believe that we're going to administer significantly more vaccines in the last two weeks of March than we have in the entire period since December.

On the day (10 days ago) that @MichealMartinTD told us that we would do 1.25 million doses by the end of March he insisted that the government's projections had already "factored in" lower Astra Zeneca supply in Q2.

reuters.com/article/health…

What is interesting is that we've been told of two 25,000 AZ shipments that have not arrived (and they're promised in March anyway).

But, say they had arrived. We'd be 50,000 better off on March 15. On 635,000 doses administered rather than the projected 585,000.

That's still 615,000 short of the 1.25 million and we'd have to go at almost 40,000 a day, anyway (faster than our May ramp-up rate) to get to the target.

So, we must have been planning for huge shipments of incoming vaccines from next week and a corresponding massive increase in administration speed from Monday March 16th.

Why not tell people that, though? If the plan was for us to be going at well in excess of 250,000 vaccinations a week from next Monday week why tell people that we'll only be doing it in April and May?

It can't be expectation management because we're not hitting any of our own targets anyway. No matter how low we set them.

This seems to confirm that we'll be at a maximum of 585,000 doses by March 15th. Makes hitting the 1.25 million target set by the Taoiseach, ten days ago, for the end of March look, erm, "challenging".

https://twitter.com/newschambers/status/1367879212867215360?s=20

Although, Taoiseach says he's confident we can do 670,000 doses in the last 16 days of March.

https://twitter.com/newschambers/status/1367880570806673414?s=20

Interesting to hear #rtenews say that our performance is falling short of the “100,000 per week promised for the month of March.”

We were promised a lot more than 100,000 per week for the month of March.

Closer to 200,000 per week, on average, to hit the 1.25 million

Ten days on from setting the target and 26 days away from actually having to achieve it, here we are:

Some interesting facts in that piece. Government is apparently complaining that AZ delivery volumes up to the end of February were only half of what they should have been under plan.

But when Micheál Martin said we were going to hit 1.25 million doses by the end of March he insisted, several times, that the AZ shortfall for Q2 had been “factored in”.

Since then we’ve been told that two AZ deliveries of 25,000 didn’t land when they were supposed to. We were told that they are still expected in March and that we’d “catch up”. We have not been told about other missed or delayed deliveries (to my knowledge, anyway).

If they don’t arrive, we’ll be 50,000 down. So 1.2m doses administered by the end of March, then?

We now plan to be on about 585,000 doses administered on the morning of March 15.

If you just straight line out speed from the first half of the month through to the end, we’ll miss the 1.25 million target by almost 500,000. Not 50,000.

There is a a massive acceleration required from March 15 just to miss the 1.25m target by an appalling bad margin as opposed to an absolutely catastrophic one of half a million.

Leo Varadkar this morning seems to be saying that the supply issue is around 25,000 doses not 50,000.

Company says they will arrive this month, anyway.

But things are “going well”. So, presumably, we’re still on target for the 1.25 million by the end of the month.

We're now being told that our total deliveries of vaccines to end of the March will only be 850,000.

irishtimes.com/news/health/le…

We had received 520,000 by the end of February. So we're only expected to receive 330,000 this month.

By the end of February, a few days after the Taoiseach's 1.25 million pledge, we had administered a total of 440,000 doses.

This meant that we were 'planning' on administering 810,000 doses in March at an average daily rate of 26,000 per day.

But we're now being told that we'll only have 330,000 of the doses required.

There's always a lag between delivery and administration so, today, eight days in to March we can already forecast that we're going to miss the forecast 1.25 million administered target (set four days before the start of March) by, approximately, half a million doses.

Remember, that on February 23rd, the Taoiseach insisted under questioning, that AZ supply shortfalls had been "factored in" to this 1.25 million promise.

For us to be missing the 1.25 million target by, a really quite incredible, 500,000 then there would have to be "new" supply shortfalls of approximately 600,000 between February 23rd and the end of March.

Or, put it another way, we're effectively being told that we're getting more than 120,000 fewer doses every week on average than we thought we were getting on February 23rd.

So far, we've only been told that one or two AZ shipments of 25,000 each have been "delayed".