Renu­ka Singh

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rance Deyals­ingh said yes­ter­day that on­ly one com­bi­na­tion of mixed vac­cines will be ac­cept­ed as ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed, by peo­ple com­ing in­to this coun­try.

He was speak­ing at the COVID-19 news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day.

“The on­ly vac­cine mix­ing to be con­sid­ered to be ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed in T&T as per our pol­i­cy is first dose As­traZeneca, fol­lowed by a sec­ond dose Pfiz­er and two weeks,” he said.

“No oth­er com­bi­na­tion at this time...that could change if oth­er rec­om­men­da­tions come out...no oth­er com­bi­na­tion at this time will qual­i­fy you to be ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed in T&T to en­ter with­out be­ing quar­an­tined,” he said.

Any­one who en­ters the coun­try with an un­recog­nised mix must quar­an­tine for two weeks and then Deyals­ingh di­rect­ed that they speak with the pri­vate physi­cian.

“And get an opin­ion as to whether they can take oth­er vac­cines avail­able in T&T. That is a pri­vate de­ci­sion,” he said.

Prin­ci­pal Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Maryam Ab­dool-Richards con­firmed that there was an in­crease in COVID-19 re­lat­ed hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tions in To­ba­go.

Ab­dool-Richards at­tend­ed yes­ter­day’s COVID-19 up­date but di­rect­ed all ques­tions for ad­di­tion­al in­for­ma­tion on the To­ba­go cas­es to the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly and the To­ba­go Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty.

Mean­while, a med­ical doc­tor is among the peo­ple named in files be­fore the po­lice for pro­vid­ing fake im­mu­ni­sa­tion cards to buy­ers.

Guardian Me­dia has learned that a fake im­mu­ni­sa­tion card costs be­tween $500 and $800. The doc­tor signs off the card as if the vac­cine has been ad­min­is­tered.

Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, while speak­ing yes­ter­day at the COVID-19 up­date, con­firmed that the Min­istry was aware of pos­si­ble fake im­mu­ni­sa­tion cards and took im­me­di­ate steps to mit­i­gate against them.

Deyals­ingh said that he too was aware of the “chat­ter” about fake im­mu­ni­sa­tions and the Min­istry now matched the num­ber of im­mu­ni­sa­tion cards to ac­tu­al jabs so that when rec­on­ciled at the end of the day, it would en­sure no cards were miss­ing.

This, Deyals­ingh said, has been done in the past two weeks.

“What we did when we got wind of that, we im­me­di­ate­ly re­vised the way we dis­trib­ute vac­ci­na­tions cards,” he said.

“We ad­min­is­ter im­mu­ni­sa­tion cards at all sites, in tan­dem with the num­ber of vac­cines. So if a site is get­ting 100 vac­cines a day, you get 100 cards a day, that is one mit­i­ga­tion strat­e­gy,” he said.

“Some files are ac­tu­al­ly on the way to the po­lice based on whistle­blow­er in­for­ma­tion, we are tak­ing this so se­ri­ous­ly,” he said.

Deyals­ingh quot­ed from the Forgery Act which stip­u­lat­ed that peo­ple charged could face sev­en years in prison.