Ireland will soon need to be vaccinating around 400,000 people a week to meet the targets set out by the Taoiseach last night.

Announcing the updated Living with COVID-19 plan yesterday, Micheál Martin said up to 82% of adults will have received their first dose by the end of June.

On The Pat Kenny Show this morning, Trinity Immunology Professor Kingston Mills said it is “always very dangerous” to make predictions but noted that things could move even faster if new vaccines are approved quickly.

“It actually might be better than they predict if a number of companies that are not yet licensed in Europe do get licensed – and it is very likely they will,” he said.

Trinity College Dublin Professor Kingston Mills | Image: TCD

Professor Mills said both the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and the Novavax vaccine are “very good” and should be licenced soon along with the Curevac jab.

“I actually think we will be in a good place in terms of supply in a couple of months and the issue then is getting it out to people and having in place the infrastructure,” he said.

“By my reckoning, they are going to need to be immunising around 400,000 people a week to meet those targets.

“That is not that demanding, I mean the Danes have said they are going to immunise half a million people a week and they have a population not much more than Ireland.”

Here's the new vaccination delivery timeline from the government plan. More ambitious that previously thought pic.twitter.com/B01x1lAmVg

— Seán Defoe (@SeanDefoe) February 23, 2021

Professor Mills said Danish officials have been “very clever” in their vaccine strategy, purchasing surplus Pfizer doses and making use of a “fantastic integrated IT system” that tracks appointments an vaccine doses in real time.

He said the most important thing will be the establishment of mass vaccination centres to roll out tens of thousands of doses per day when they become available.

“The fact of the matter is that giving a vaccine is not a particularly complicated procedure and it is well within the capacity of lots of semi-trained individuals […] to do this,” he said.

“In Scotland they have drive-in vaccine centres where people drive up, roll down their window, expose their arm and go.

“I saw a photo of one person on the left and one person on the right, driver and passenger, they drove in there, got their vaccine, parked their car, waited for 20 minutes and they were away.

“That is what we need to be looking at. It is doable and we can vaccinate the 370,000 or 500,000 in a week that we need to do once we get the supply of the vaccine.”

Jimmy Thomson from Musselburgh gets his COVID-19 vaccine at a drive-through vaccination centre in the Queen Margaret University Campus, Musselburgh, Scotland, 10-02-2021. Image: Jane Barlow/PA Wire/PA Images

Professor Mills said it is essential that measures are taken to prevent new variants coming in to the country in the meantime.

“The big fly in the ointment is the variants,” he said.

“If we let these variants in from Brazil, South Africa and the ones that are now emerging in the United States that are going to cause a problem for the vaccine, then the whole rulebook is torn up and you start again in terms of getting immunity in the population.

“It will be much more difficult when we have these variants. It won’t be insurmountable but it will set us back.”