T&T is now one step clos­er to ac­quir­ing a vac­cine for COVID-19 when­ev­er one is dis­cov­ered.

This is ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh who at­trib­uted the move to re­cent cor­re­spon­dence be­tween Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (PA­HO) head Dr Caris­sa Eti­enne and Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley.

“What it means is if and when you have a safe, re­li­able vac­cine re­gard­less of its price of pro­duc­tion, Trinidad and To­ba­go via the ho­n­ourable Prime Min­is­ter...we are now firm­ly a part of the PA­HO bar­gain­ing process to bring po­ten­tial vac­cines to Trinidad and To­ba­go,” Deyals­ingh said af­ter read­ing the cor­re­spon­dence be­tween the two of­fi­cials.

Deyals­ingh ex­plained this means that T&T would not need to go to any man­u­fac­tur­er di­rect­ly as an in­di­vid­ual coun­try to ac­quire it.

Read­ing di­rect­ly from a let­ter sent to Dr Row­ley on Ju­ly 2 from PA­HO, Deyals­ingh said: “At our re­cent­ly con­vened 166th ses­sion of the ex­ec­u­tive com­mit­tee last month res­o­lu­tion CEI66.R5 was adopt­ed, di­rect­ing our or­gan­i­sa­tion to sup­port mem­ber states...in en­gag­ing with glob­al ini­tia­tives such as COVID-19 tools, ac­cel­er­a­tors for vac­cines.”

Ac­cord­ing to Deyal­is­ngh’s read­ing of the re­sponse by Dr Row­ley which was sent on Mon­day, the Prime Min­is­ter con­firmed the coun­try’s in­ter­est in ac­cess­ing the vac­cine “us­ing the PA­HO re­volv­ing fund mech­a­nism”.

How­ev­er, he not­ed in the let­ter that the coun­try’s ex­pres­sion of in­ter­est was “non-bind­ing at this stage.” —Rishard Khan