JavaScript is disabled in your web browser or browser is too old to support JavaScript. Today almost all web pages contain JavaScript, a scripting programming language that runs on visitor's web browser. It makes web pages functional for specific purposes and if disabled for some reason, the content or the functionality of the web page can be limited or unavailable.

Wednesday, March 19, 2025

4,416 vaccines administered in one day

by

Derek Achong
1381 days ago
20210606
Employees in the manufacturing sector register to receive the COVID-19 vaccine at the Trinidad and Tobago Manufacturing Association Mass Vaccination Centre, Divali Nagar Compound, Chaguanas, yesterday.

Employees in the manufacturing sector register to receive the COVID-19 vaccine at the Trinidad and Tobago Manufacturing Association Mass Vaccination Centre, Divali Nagar Compound, Chaguanas, yesterday.

ANISTO ALVES

The coun­try’s first pub­lic/pri­vate mass vac­ci­na­tion dri­ve has ex­ceed­ed ex­pec­ta­tions with 2,697 em­ploy­ees in the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor be­ing vac­ci­nat­ed yes­ter­day.
While Health Min­is­ter Ter­rance Deyals­ingh es­ti­mat­ed that 2,500 cit­i­zens a day could be ser­viced at the Di­vali Na­gar in Ch­agua­nas, 197 more were able to ben­e­fit from yes­ter­day’s event which was a part­ner­ship be­tween the Min­istry of Health, the Min­istry Trade and In­dus­try, and the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA).
Sources said that im­pres­sive num­bers achieved set a lo­cal record for the most num­ber of vac­cines ad­min­is­tered at a sin­gle lo­ca­tion over a day.
Ac­cord­ing to sta­tis­tics pre­sent­ed by the Min­istry of Health in its dai­ly COVID-19 up­date, late yes­ter­day af­ter­noon, a to­tal of 118,577 had re­ceived their first dose on Sun­day as com­pared to 114,161 on Sat­ur­day. 
The TTMA’s mem­bers that were vac­ci­nat­ed dur­ing the dri­ve ac­count­ed for al­most two thirds of all cit­i­zens across T&T who got their first dose yes­ter­day.

Ad­dress­ing the me­dia at the start of the dri­ve, Deyals­ingh said the ini­tia­tive would great­ly as­sist the Gov­ern­ment in achiev­ing its vac­ci­na­tion goals and in turn al­low it to re­open more sec­tors in the coun­try soon­er.
“We want to get back and open the econ­o­my as soon as hu­man­ly pos­si­ble...This will ex­po­nen­tial­ly in­crease the num­ber of vac­ci­nat­ed per­sons in T&T,” Deyals­ingh said. 
He said af­ter the TTMA’s mem­bers use the 5,000 vac­cines al­lot­ted for their first dose, the site would be used to serve oth­er sec­tors such as food and bev­er­age, which have al­so part­nered with the min­istry and been giv­en pri­or­i­ty ac­cess to vac­cines. 
Deyals­ingh al­so not­ed that the mass vac­ci­na­tion dri­ve will al­so fo­cus on the con­struc­tion and pri­vate se­cu­ri­ty sec­tors and would work in tan­dem with the cur­rent ap­point­ments sys­tem used by re­gion­al health care cen­tres. 
He al­so not­ed that on Wednes­day, the min­istry would launch its first come first serve sys­tem at re­gion­al health cen­tres for per­sons over 60 with­out non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases and per­sons un­der 60 with non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases such as asth­ma and obe­si­ty. 
He sug­gest­ed that pro­vid­ed that the Gov­ern­ment re­ceives a steady sup­ply of com­mer­cial­ly ob­tained vac­cines, as ex­pect­ed, it hopes to ex­tend the vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme and ful­ly cov­er an ad­di­tion­al 380,000 cit­i­zens by Oc­to­ber. 
Deyals­ingh al­so praised the TTMA for or­gan­is­ing the ini­tia­tive at short no­tice as he claimed that it had come up with use­ful ideas for mak­ing the vac­ci­na­tion dri­ve more ef­fi­cient while main­tain­ing safe­ty. 
“I must say that they did not on­ly take the tem­plate but they ac­tu­al­ly im­proved on it. They learned from us and we are now go­ing to learn from them,” Deyals­ingh said. 
He al­so re­vealed that the min­istry was ex­pect­ing a fresh batch of vac­cines this week, but de­clined to give de­tails over the man­u­fac­tur­er and the quan­ti­ty un­til clos­er to that time. 
TTMA pres­i­dent Tri­cia Coos­al said that she was pleased with her mem­bers’ re­sponse to the vac­ci­nate dri­ve and even not­ed that it was over­sub­scribed with mem­bers putting for­ward more par­tic­i­pants that could have been ac­com­mo­dat­ed with the spe­cif­ic al­lo­ca­tion of vac­cines. 
“This au­gurs well for man­u­fac­tur­ers as we be­lieve that we are the lifeblood of the econ­o­my and we can con­tin­ue to sus­tain liveli­hoods while be­ing safe and pre­serv­ing lives,” Coos­al said. 
Coos­al not­ed that there had been some vac­cine hes­i­tan­cy but said that her or­gan­i­sa­tion was ad­dress­ing it by com­bat­ing mis­in­for­ma­tion with pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion pro­grammes. 
Yes­ter­day’s vac­ci­na­tion dri­ve, which utilised the As­traZeneca vac­cine, was sup­port­ed by vol­un­teers from the T&T Med­ical As­so­ci­a­tion and Se­wa In­ter­na­tion­al TT. 
The as­so­ci­a­tion’s pres­i­dent Dr Vishi Be­har­ry claimed that med­ical pro­fes­sion­als in­clud­ing doc­tors, in­terns, nurs­es and even vet­eri­nar­i­ans had vol­un­teered to give up their week­end to as­sist in vac­ci­nat­ing cit­i­zens.
“They all came out and un­der­stand that we have to vac­ci­nate our pop­u­la­tion. We are here to sup­port as al­ways,” Be­har­ry said. 
Al­so speak­ing at the event was Trade and In­dus­try Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon who said she hoped that it would be ex­tend­ed to more non-es­sen­tial man­u­fac­tur­ers so that the Gov­ern­ment could pos­si­bly achieve its goal of a 50 per cent in­crease in man­u­fac­tur­ing by 2025. 
“The on­ly way we can do that is to get every­one vac­ci­nat­ed,” Gopee-Scoon said. 
In a brief in­ter­view af­ter re­ceiv­ing his vac­cine, Ray­on George, an em­ploy­ee of Carib Glass, said he was pleased with the ini­tia­tive as he had at­tempt­ed to se­cure an ap­point­ment but was un­suc­cess­ful.
“I en­cour­age peo­ple to come out to get this vac­cine be­cause we could be able to open places faster and the coun­try could go back to some nor­mal­cy,” George said.
Speak­ing at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre in St Ann’s on Sat­ur­day, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley re­vealed that through an arrange­ment with the African Med­ical Coun­cil (AMC) the coun­try is ex­pect­ed to re­ceive 800,000 dos­es of the John­son & John­son one-dose vac­cines by Au­gust.

A sec­ond ship­ment of Sinopharm vac­cines to sup­ple­ment the 100,000 dos­es do­nat­ed by the Chi­nese Gov­ern­ment is al­so ex­pect­ed to ar­rive in T&T, lat­er this week. 
“We can now con­fi­dent­ly say that we have a vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme by the next 12 weeks... June, Ju­ly, Au­gust...de­pend­ing on the ship­ping arrange­ments, we would be able to vac­ci­nate a sub­stan­tial amount of peo­ple,” Row­ley said.
He added: “We can now fair­ly, rea­son­ably say that we are at the be­gin­ning of what is re­quired to bring this in­fec­tion un­der con­trol, to have some sem­blance of nor­mal­cy re­turn­ing to our coun­try and lives.” 
Row­ley al­so re­vealed that based on cur­rent lo­cal vac­ci­na­tion fig­ures and mass vac­ci­na­tions in North Amer­i­ca, the Gov­ern­ment would move to re­open the coun­try’s bor­ders and re­move the en­try ex­emp­tion process that has been in place since, last March, in the next four to six weeks.


Related articles

Sponsored

Weather

PORT OF SPAIN WEATHER

Sponsored