Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh and Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram are again urg­ing the pub­lic to get them­selves vac­ci­nat­ed against the in­fluen­za virus.

Dur­ing the Min­istry of Health’s COVID-19 me­dia brief­ing Sat­ur­day, Deyals­ingh said de­spite en­cour­ag­ing the pub­lic, the num­bers of peo­ple com­ing for­ward to ac­cess the free vac­cine had con­tin­ued to de­cline.

Ad­vis­ing on the im­por­tance of vac­cines, Paras­ram ex­plained, “A vac­cine is a prod­uct that stim­u­lates a per­son’s im­mune sys­tem to pro­duce im­mu­ni­ty to a spe­cif­ic dis­ease, there­by pro­tect­ing the per­son from that par­tic­u­lar dis­ease.”

He re­flect­ed on the suc­cess of oth­er vac­cines in erad­i­cat­ing dis­eases such as small­pox, measles, mumps and rubel­la glob­al­ly.

To the an­ti-vaxxers move­ment, Deyals­ingh said it was some­thing the au­thor­i­ties have been deal­ing with and as a re­sult, they are prepar­ing to em­bark on a pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion cam­paign in Jan­u­ary high­light­ing the safe­ty and ben­e­fits of vac­cines.

He said they are cur­rent­ly work­ing on de­vel­op­ing the three Ms–the mes­sage, mes­sen­gers, and medi­um–as they are very se­ri­ous about reach­ing all cit­i­zens, es­pe­cial­ly those on so­cial me­dia.

In the 4 pm clin­i­cal up­date pro­vid­ed Sat­ur­day, a to­tal of 44 new COVID-19 pos­i­tive cas­es were record­ed with­in 24 hours from Fri­day; while deaths re­mained at 118; and re­cov­ered pa­tients stood at 5,732.

With 780 ac­tive cas­es, 671 peo­ple were said to be in home iso­la­tion, with 38 at hos­pi­tal; 27 in step-down fa­cil­i­ties; and 347 in state quar­an­tine.