The Tropical Medical Bureau (TMB), Ireland’s largest private vaccination company and a specialist in travel vaccines, has said that the HSE has not responded to its offer of help with the national Covid-19 vaccine rollout.
Dr Graham Fry, Founder and Group Medical Director of TMB said, “we are well experienced in the administering of vaccinations. We are having difficulty in understanding why there has been no response from the Department of Health, the Health Minister, or the HSE to our offer of help with the vaccination roll-out strategy.”
“TMB reached out to the Irish government (March 2020), offering assistance and support, both staff and facilities, to the Minister for Health Mr. Stephen Donnelly, other ministers as well as the HSE.”
“To date, TMB has not been called on to assist with the vaccine rollout in Ireland.”
TMB has a team of highly trained and experienced vaccination doctors and nurses, with 20 clinics and drive-thru facilities nationwide and a mobile vaccination service. It administers an average of 200,000 vaccines a year, to both the private and public sector, in Ireland and the UK. In its statement, it says that despite this, the HSE and its recruiters “are signing up vaccinators with no vaccination experience, e.g., physiotherapists, paramedics, dentists.”
TMB has expressed surprise that although the HSE are “desperate to recruit vaccinators” (and point to a Facebook ad ‘urgently seeking’ vaccinators) they continue to ignore “Ireland’s most experienced vaccinator.” TMB also takes issue with slow rollout of the vaccinations: “we have known about the vaccines for almost six months and yet we seem only now to be putting the infrastructure in place to get our population covered.”
(Main image by Angelo Esslinger from Pixabay)
