There are concerns that Ireland does not have the correct systems in place to distribute a Covid-19 vaccine effectively,
The cabinet has agreed to enter an advanced purchase order for 875,000 doses of the Moderna COVID vaccine.
The EU is expecting to buy around 80 million doses of which Ireland will get a little more than 1 per cent.
It means there are now purchase orders between Ireland and five of the vaccines under development.
That would give the country access to more than 10 million doses of vaccine - though some will be a double dose.
However, The Pfizer BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine needs to be stored at subzero temperatures which has raised concerns globally on logistic strategies.
Stephen Delaney, CEO of Q.1. Scientific in Waterford, says monitoring the temperature is a far greater challenge than freezing process:
"The real challenge is how you are set up to store it. It's not a challenge to source freezers or units but really the challenge is around in how you're set up in your facilities, how you are going to monitor your chambers. And of course the obvious one is electrical backup."
Storage and distribution challenges were among the queries raised with the COVID-19 task-force when they met yesterday.
Delaney also says continuous, uninterrupted monitoring of storage conditions is vital:
"It's very difficult to say what the impact is if a freezer warms up to -60 degrees for 30 minutes, an hour or 12 hours but really you want to rule out that situation happening and not have to get into that issue and you want to just maintain the set point that has been prescribed by the manufacturer at all times".
