Yeah I agree June was poor and there are too many in the fridge. I just like to stick to the reality, April and May were strong months. They have underperformed in June. There isn’t enough accountability for when this happens, the J&J thing was wheeled out in early June when it wasn’t relevant for a month at that point. When we talk about previous targets and rates, we always had to adjust to both supply and guidance, that’s why focusing on graphs from March is unrealistic. The reality is in May that we knew J&J had both restricted supply and restricted use, but they said the extra Pfizer meant it wasn’t as big a deal. A couple of weeks later they changed tact and acted like it was a shock, when it wasn’t.
I prefer to focus on what they can control. Last week they got 317k Pfizer in and delivered just 80k of them as first doses. The week before they got 252k doses and just 74k went out as first doses. The week previous to that they managed to get close to the 50%, with 124k of the 251k delivered given out. If we take those last two weeks, based on their own strategy they were 125k doses below what they should have been- that’s 3.33% of the adult population. In my view they should have been pushing the envelope and getting 200k first doses out of Pfizer so they could get close to the 80% and I thought that going by their confidence of being on track that it is what they would do.
The decline appears to be because they started to give more AZ second doses out in vaccination centres, why didn’t they just send those people to the pharmacies where they had capacity because they were doing so few of the J&J they had planned?
Take up in Ireland is massive. They can’t give them away in lots of countries and some countries are looking at incentives to get people to take them up.
You would say it would stand to us come winter when countries with lower vaccination rates get hit with another wave, but we will will probably close everything anyway just to be on the safe side.
