At the time of writ­ing, 55 peo­ple had been con­firmed as hav­ing, un­for­tu­nate­ly, died in T&T of the coro­n­avirus in May alone and, as day fol­lows night, I am sure by the time you read this that fig­ure would have in­creased.

We al­so have more than 4,000 ac­tive cas­es of peo­ple who are strick­en with the virus and our hope and prayers are that they will re­cov­er ful­ly.

This lat­est wave is with­out doubt the most in­tense we have seen and the signs are that we are in dan­ger­ous ter­ri­to­ry.

Most of us now know of peo­ple who have got­ten the virus and too many of us know peo­ple who have suc­cumbed to it.

I have spent sig­nif­i­cant space here talk­ing about how as a coun­try, our in­dis­ci­pline, our lack of lead­er­ship that leads to a lack of fo­cus and es­prit de corps, makes us un­der­achieve and this has al­lowed us to let down our guard in the fight against COVID-19.

I do not want to spend time here talk­ing about whether the Gov­ern­ment failed to heed the wis­dom of the med­ical ex­perts and what role To­ba­go and our To­ba­go-born Prime Min­is­ter played in the spread by his ex­hor­ta­tion to peo­ple to vis­it the is­land of his birth for East­er.

They heard his mes­sage and went to the sis­ter isle in their tens of thou­sands and, as could have been ex­pect­ed, the ex­plo­sion fol­lowed. For me, that is now in the rear-view mir­ror.

What is im­por­tant is how do we get out of this, be­cause the eco­nom­ic and so­cial price we have al­ready paid will be mag­ni­fied if we are not smart and dis­ci­plined in our ap­proach.

It is glob­al­ly ac­cept­ed that the way to get out of a COVID cri­sis is through mass vac­ci­na­tion. Our Gov­ern­ment has said they ac­cept this and the Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh is on record as say­ing that the Gov­ern­ment in­tends to achieve heard im­mu­ni­ty by the end of the year.

He told the Sen­ate on Tues­day that three things were cru­cial to herd im­mu­ni­ty: “One is avail­abil­i­ty of vac­cines, which we must have in large num­bers, which we’re cur­rent­ly work­ing on to good ef­fect. Two is pub­lic con­fi­dence in the vac­cines. And three, we need to get the UNC to stop un­der­min­ing Gov­ern­ment’s vac­ci­na­tion plan—that’s the most im­por­tant com­po­nent to reach herd im­mu­ni­ty. If the UNC, as led by the ho­n­ourable Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and her spokes­men, keep on un­der­min­ing faith in the vac­cines, we won’t achieve it (herd im­mu­ni­ty).”

He said com­ing to­geth­er and pro­vid­ing lead­er­ship were need­ed.

“How­ev­er, if the Op­po­si­tion works with us we could ad­min­is­ter 700,000 vac­cines in about six to sev­en months to get herd im­mu­ni­ty based on de­ploy­ing vac­cines to 104 health cen­tres and ten mass vac­ci­na­tion sites as I in­di­cat­ed in my Cab­i­net note.”

The Min­is­ter of Health is right in terms of vac­cine ac­cess and vac­cine hes­i­tan­cy and is even right about the fail­ure of the Op­po­si­tion UNC to put coun­try first and play a con­struc­tive role in the fight against this pan­dem­ic, but the min­is­ter and Gov­ern­ment have dropped the ball on so many oc­ca­sions it has to in­tro­spect. At the end of the day, the coun­try dropped the ball on the pro­cure­ment of vac­cines and should have been well on its way in its vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme.

The vac­cine short­ages glob­al­ly are with­out ques­tion but we have seen oth­er Caribbean is­lands that have been will­ing to be more in­no­v­a­tive and nim­ble, in­clud­ing Bar­ba­dos and Ja­maica ben­e­fit­ing from their ini­tia­tive.

There are those who have even sug­gest­ed that the Gov­ern­ment’s in­abil­i­ty to pro­cure some vac­cines from mak­ers like Pfiz­er is be­cause of con­cerns over the cost of the vac­cines and that the strat­e­gy was al­ways to wait on vac­cines from the Chi­nese as part of a wider loan.

I think such talk has to be wrong be­cause, if true, this Gov­ern­ment is both pen­ny smart and pound fool­ish and, more than that, un­con­scionable.

Any back of the en­ve­lope cal­cu­la­tion of Pfiz­er vac­cines cost­ing as much as US$23 a dose, where you need two mil­lion dos­es to vac­ci­nate at least one mil­lion cit­i­zens, means you will need to ex­pend US$46 mil­lion or $313 mil­lion. That is in a re­al sense lit­tle mon­ey for T&T, which has bil­lions of US dol­lars in the Cen­tral Bank and the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund.

Who would ob­ject to the Gov­ern­ment dip­ping in­to the fund to buy vac­cines?

The Fi­nance Min­is­ter on Mon­day tweet­ed the cost of the lat­est gov­ern­ment help to cit­i­zens, which he puts at $440 mil­lion. The math does not work. It can­not be that the Gov­ern­ment was hedg­ing for oth­er vac­cines and loans. That would be neg­li­gence.

Pfiz­er’s chief fi­nan­cial of­fi­cer Frank D’Ame­lio is re­port­ed as hav­ing said once the pan­dem­ic is over, the com­pa­ny will sig­nif­i­cant­ly in­crease the price it is charg­ing for the COVID-19 vac­cine.

He not­ed that coun­tries were now get­ting what he called pan­dem­ic prices.

Pfiz­er is charg­ing the US$19.50 per dose, D’Ame­lio said, which is “not a nor­mal price like we typ­i­cal­ly get for a vac­cine—$150, $175 per dose. So, pan­dem­ic pric­ing.”

He added that Pfiz­er is “go­ing to get more on price” and will in­crease out­put at its fac­to­ries, dri­ving pro­duc­tion costs per unit low­er

In ini­tial deals with the US gov­ern­ment, Pfiz­er and BioN­Tech’s vac­cine costs US$19.50 per dose, com­pared with US$15 for Mod­er­na’s shot, US$16 for No­vavax’s pro­gramme, US$10 for John­son & John­son’s vac­cine and US$4 for As­traZeneca’s. Pfiz­er didn’t take any gov­ern­ment de­vel­op­ment funds for its shot, while oth­er play­ers re­ceived var­i­ous amounts of as­sis­tance, and Pfiz­er was the first to reach the mar­ket.

So it must be a lack of ac­cess.

Now that it ap­pears the Sinopharm vac­cines are go­ing to be made avail­able, the Gov­ern­ment must not drop the ball on this one. It must now start a pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion cam­paign en­cour­ag­ing peo­ple to be­come vac­ci­nat­ed. It must re­as­sure peo­ple, who right­ly must con­sid­er their own risks and de­ter­mine how safe they feel to take the vac­cine. For what it is worth, I have tak­en my first jab, as has my moth­er and oth­er close rel­a­tives and none of us has had bad ex­pe­ri­ences with it.

The pan­dem­ic has cost T&T too much al­ready and we are go­ing to be faced with a coun­try that, even if we get it right go­ing for­ward, would have lost hun­dreds of lives, bil­lions in val­ue, thou­sands of jobs, se­ri­ous struc­tur­al changes and we will have to pick up the pieces.

We will get some help in 2022 and 2023.

Our com­modi­ties pro­duc­tion of oil and gas will im­prove.

Our prices for petro­chem­i­cals should sta­bilise at high­er lev­els than they were a year ago.

We have fi­nal­ly seen that Car­ni­val is an im­por­tant part of the econ­o­my and just may see it and tourism as some­thing im­por­tant to de­vel­op.

The Min­istry of Health and the wider so­ci­ety might just re­alise that a health­i­er na­tion, one that pro­motes ex­er­cise and di­etary changes, are all in our in­ter­ests. We may see that food se­cu­ri­ty and farm­ing are im­por­tant and most of all, we will see how tech­nol­o­gy saved us. There is much to wor­ry about and grieve but in do­ing so, we have to turn to the fu­ture and al­so look at how this econ­o­my could be­come more sus­tain­able.

We have to think big and big is not pen­ny smart and pound fool­ish.