Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh is de­fend­ing the min­istry’s strat­e­gy for ac­quir­ing mon­key­pox vac­cines, af­ter op­po­si­tion MP Dr Rishad Seecha­ran said oth­er non-World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO) av­enues should be ex­plored.

Speak­ing at the min­istry’s COVID-19 vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Deyals­ingh said such a move is not pos­si­ble.

“There is one man­u­fac­tur­er in the world (of mon­key­pox vac­cines) called Bavar­i­an Nordic. PA­HO (Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion) has been ap­point­ed, these are my words, the agent for the PA­HO re­gion and PA­HO, by res­o­lu­tion, has in­di­cat­ed that they will be deal­ing with this lone man­u­fac­tur­er,” he said.

T&T has or­dered 2,000 dos­es of mon­key­pox vac­cines with an in­dica­tive or­der through PA­HO.

Deyals­ingh said the op­po­si­tion’s state­ments on the mat­ter were mis­lead­ing the pub­lic. He said if they wish to as­sist the coun­try in ac­quir­ing the vac­cines, they can join him in ap­peal­ing to larg­er coun­tries for dos­es.

Ac­quir­ing mon­key­pox vac­cines has en­coun­tered a sim­i­lar prob­lem to those ex­pe­ri­enced when dos­es for COVID-19 were just de­vel­oped - large coun­tries are buy­ing them up and cre­at­ing dif­fi­cul­ties for small­er na­tions to ac­quire them.

While there is still no news on when and at what cost T&T will re­ceive its mon­key­pox dos­es, Deyals­ingh said they were able to find out the shelf life of the dos­es. He said this ranges be­tween three years if stored at -20 de­grees or five years if stored at -50 de­grees. Deyals­ingh said T&T has the ca­pac­i­ty to store it at the low­er tem­per­a­ture to keep the dos­es longer.

He said the ex­act ex­pi­ra­tion date of dos­es com­ing to T&T will be de­ter­mined when the con­tract is signed.

On Sun­day, Dr Seecha­ran called on Deyals­ingh to ex­plore oth­er op­tions for ac­quir­ing the vac­cines, crit­i­cis­ing the min­istry for its heavy re­liance on WHO plat­forms. He cit­ed the dif­fi­cul­ties in ac­quir­ing dos­es through plat­forms such as CO­V­AX dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. He sug­gest­ed diplo­mat­ic chan­nels al­so be ex­plored to have dos­es do­nat­ed to T&T.