Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty and Safe City Op­er­a­tions ex­pert Garvin Heer­ah is call­ing on the Gov­ern­ment to stop the vac­ci­na­tion dri­ve for 72 hours un­til a prop­er plan is de­vel­oped and com­mu­ni­cat­ed.

And that plan he be­lieves should be de­vel­oped and test­ed by na­tion­al ex­perts and not just the Min­istry of Health.

“To deal with this sce­nario peo­ple need to hum­ble them­selves, step aside and al­low ex­perts to take con­trol, it shouldn’t be be­cause of who I am based on a sig­na­ture that I will get to run this cri­sis,” Heer­ah told Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day.

The for­mer di­rec­tor at the Na­tion­al Op­er­a­tions Cen­tre said sad­ly he pre­dict­ed Wednes­day’s chaos.

“It bor­dered to be quite truth­ful on chaos and in some in­stances, it was re­al­ly fright­en­ing, Trinidad, our hearts bled yes­ter­day,” Heer­ah said.

Heer­ah said Wednes­day proved yet again some­thing he has been say­ing for quite some time - that Gov­ern­ment needs to de­vel­op a COVID-19 Task Force which would then lead to the for­ma­tion of a COVID-19 Cri­sis Man­age­ment Cen­tre.

He added yes­ter­day’s ‘so-called fix’ to the so­lu­tion showed that not enough plan­ning and in­for­ma­tion gath­er­ing is tak­ing place.

“It was re­al­ly an op­tion B that came on the ta­ble late yes­ter­day evening, let’s try this, let’s go by al­pha­bet­i­cal and by age, come on guys, we can be a lot more pro­fes­sion­al than this.”

And the pro­fes­sion­als he be­lieves should come from out­side the Gov­ern­ment sec­tor.

Heer­ah said the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment (ODPM) has ex­per­tise in evac­u­at­ing en­tire cities and should have been con­sult­ed. Heer­ah al­so ques­tioned if the De­fence Force was ap­proached for as­sis­tance.

“This is what we do, the mil­i­tary, this is how we run things and there­fore I’m say­ing come on, bring the mil­i­tary on board let them work with it, there are re­tirees and sub­ject mat­ter ex­perts.”

Heer­ah said out­side of the box thinkers are al­so need­ed for projects like these.

“No­body, no­body man­ages mega lo­gis­tics and plan­ning smoother than our fete pro­mot­ers and our band lead­ers.”

He said these ex­perts would have done com­mu­ni­ty im­pact as­sess­ments and dry runs to test the sys­tem be­fore­hand.

Heer­ah is there­fore ad­vis­ing the Health Min­istry to hold up on vac­ci­na­tions for now un­til a prop­er plan is put in place and more im­por­tant­ly, com­mu­ni­cat­ed to the pub­lic.

“Halt the op­er­a­tions for at least 72 hours and with­in that time, put some­thing struc­tured in place that is sys­tem dri­ven and process re­lat­ed so we can uti­lize a more ef­fi­cient plan with all the play­ers on board.”

Heer­ah said while this may hold back the Gov­ern­ment’s ini­tial vac­ci­na­tion plan, a prop­er sys­tem may en­cour­age those on the fence about vac­ci­na­tions to take the jab.