Monkeypox vaccines arriving in Ireland shortly, says Paul Reid

Vaccines against Monkeypox will be arriving in Ireland shortly, the HSE chief has said.

Although the HSE said on Friday that there are still “no known” cases of the virus in the Republic, the organisation’s CEO Paul Reid said “more likely than not” we will see cases of monkeypox within our own health service. He insisted, however, it is not a cause for concern.

“It is a mild, self-limiting illness. Most people do recover within weeks. To reassure the public it doesn’t spread easily between people and is generally a skin-to-skin transmission. Nothing to say that it might not become possible for it to be airborne in the future.”

Mr Reid told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland that the HSE has secured an order of vaccines with delivery expected very shortly.

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“We have put in place a whole set of incident management teams communications out with our health service in terms of what to monitor. We have monitoring agreements and international surveillance in place with Europe and Northern Ireland. We do expect to secure those supplies shortly.”

Mr Reid said they will take advice from NIAC in relation to the possibility of vaccinating health care workers.

“Certainly there is evidence across Europe and the north to vaccinate health care workers who may have been in been in contact (with persons with have moneypox).”

Meanwhile, UCC Immunovirology professor, Liam Fanning, said that the HSE has an expert group already in place, ready to act. He told Newstalk that whilst monkeypox is a “very containable infection” patients diagnosed with the condition are facing a long period of isolation.

“It will be down to kind of a bit like we had with Covid-19... public health contacting people and isolation,” he said.

“I see some countries in Europe have asked that people who are virus-positive would quarantine for 21 days and that reflects the kind of natural history of this infection — where individuals can be infectious for that amount of time.”

Prof Fanning said members of the public should not be overly anxious about monkeypox.

“Again, we’ll have to depend on colleagues in public health to advise the individuals who are affected as to what their symptoms might be and those who are close contacts,” he said. “To reach out to them and say look, you know, you need to be aware that these are the possible symptoms and when you start to see little pimples appearing on your body — hands and face particularly and sometimes in the groin — that you need to pick up the phone and contact your health provider or GP.”