Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The Min­istry of Health has ac­knowl­edged the chal­lenges be­ing faced by the pub­lic in se­cur­ing ap­point­ments to re­ceive COVID-19 vac­cines and said it will con­sid­er tran­si­tion­ing to a first-come, first-served ap­proach for the fu­ture.

In the mean­time, it is ad­vis­ing cit­i­zens to take what­ev­er vac­cine is avail­able to them.

“Mem­bers of the pub­lic are asked to con­tin­ue to be pa­tient and to take a WHO-ap­proved COVID-19 vac­cine once it is made avail­able to them,” a min­istry re­lease yes­ter­day said. 

On chal­lenges to se­cure ap­point­ments, the min­istry said it was be­cause of high de­mand which has filled most ap­point­ments in some Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties.

The South West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (SWRHA) has con­firmed that all its ap­point­ments were booked. The East­ern Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty’s (ER­HA) chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Ronald Tsoi-a-Fatt said there were still ap­point­ments avail­able in his RHA.

The Min­istry said there will be more vac­cine ap­point­ment slots as the coun­try re­ceives more vac­cines. 

In the last 24 hours, 6,618 peo­ple re­ceived their first dose of the COVID-19 vac­cine. This is the high­est dai­ly jump in vac­ci­na­tions record­ed to date. There were 1,395 As­traZeneca dos­es ad­min­is­tered and 5,223 Sinopharm.

While as­sur­ances have been giv­en by the min­istry for the way for­ward, the chal­lenges of the cur­rent process have al­ready left a bad taste in the mouths of some. 

The T&T Med­ical As­so­ci­a­tion’s pub­lic re­la­tions of­fi­cer Dr Kee­gan Bhag­gan said doc­tors are al­so frus­trat­ed as they too aren’t able to se­cure ap­point­ments. He said the de­vel­op­ment could ob­struct the coun­try’s jour­ney to herd im­mu­ni­ty.

“Vac­cine hes­i­tan­cy is a ma­jor prob­lem and it’s a prob­lem that’s mul­ti-faceted. The thing about it - hu­man be­hav­iour is what it is...if the task be­comes too dif­fi­cult or chal­leng­ing or ob­struc­tive then they will take the eas­i­er route of not both­er­ing. Now you’ll end up dri­ving peo­ple who on the fence away from ac­tu­al­ly be­ing in­ter­est­ed in the vac­cine,” he said.

“In the long run, it’s on­ly go­ing to hurt us more.”

This is why he said more needs to be done to make the process more ef­fi­cient or at least give peo­ple feed­back.

“At least they’d un­der­stand where they’re at, whether they’re on a wait­ing list or some­thing like that so that they feel less de­spair when they try to get an ap­point­ment and get noth­ing in re­turn,” he said.

“That would be a big dif­fer­ence than hear­ing noth­ing at all.”

De­spite those putting vac­ci­na­tion out of their minds, there are those, like Dar­ren Ra­har­i­tar, who said he will per­se­vere. 

“I do feel dis­cour­aged to be telling you the hon­est truth but I still have to keep try­ing,” he told Guardian Me­dia.

He has been try­ing to se­cure vac­cines since April for both his par­ents who are in the 70s. Since then he’s tried to make ap­point­ments at sev­er­al lo­ca­tions.

An­oth­er per­son, Shar­da Singh told Guardian Me­dia she was re­main­ing op­ti­mistic de­spite her own frus­tra­tions to get her el­der­ly par­ents with co­mor­bidi­ties vac­ci­nat­ed. 

“If there was an­oth­er op­tion I would have been dis­cour­aged, but at this point where the virus is so ram­pant and mer­ci­less, I do not have a choice,” she said.

While the process is dif­fi­cult for some to se­cure the ap­point­ment, oth­ers have had luck and were able to se­cure spots and dos­es for them­selves or loved ones.