RISHARD KHAN
rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

A fresh batch of Pfiz­er COVID-19 vac­cines for those 12 years and old­er ar­rived in Trinidad and To­ba­go on Thurs­day morn­ing.

The batch of 75,000 dos­es is the first of 150,000 ad­di­tion­al dos­es do­nat­ed to the coun­try by the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca.  This brings to 684,570 the num­ber of dos­es to be do­nat­ed to T&T so far.

The Min­istry of For­eign and CARI­COM Af­fairs thanked the Gov­ern­ment and the peo­ple of the US for the "gen­er­ous do­na­tion", and not­ed the im­por­tant roles played by CARPHA and the US Em­bassy in Port of Spain in fa­cil­i­tat­ing this do­na­tion of vac­cines to the coun­try.

"The Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go con­tin­ues the ac­qui­si­tion of WHO-ap­proved COVID-19 vac­cines for the pop­u­la­tion, and the Min­istry of Health will be uti­liz­ing these vac­cines in its con­tin­ued na­tion­al vac­cine pro­gramme," the min­istry said in a re­lease.

In a re­lease, the US Em­bassy’s Chargé d’Af­faires Shante Moore said:

“The Unit­ed States con­tin­ues to do­nate these free COVID-19 vac­cines to the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go, and I am pleased to see 50 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion is now vac­ci­nat­ed. It is a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone, but we have al­so not­ed the drop in the num­ber of per­sons get­ting vac­ci­nat­ed, es­pe­cial­ly among the 12-18 years age group. I urge every­one to get vac­ci­nat­ed to help end this pan­dem­ic.”

The US Em­bassy’s re­lease not­ed these are the same vac­cines that all US cit­i­zens re­ceive and are the same dos­es the Unit­ed States is shar­ing glob­al­ly.

At a brief­ing yes­ter­day, Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh not­ed that once the vac­cines ar­rived on Thurs­day as planned, they will be ad­min­is­tered from Sat­ur­day. He said they will al­so be used in the na­tion­al vac­ci­na­tion dri­ve in schools from Mon­day. The dri­ve be­gan on Feb­ru­ary 21st.

The pre­vi­ous batch of around 200,000 Pfiz­er dos­es were de­stroyed af­ter they ex­pired on Feb­ru­ary 28th.