T&T will be re­ceiv­ing 75,000 dos­es of Pfiz­er next week as the cur­rent dos­es will ex­pire by Mon­day said Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh.

The 260,000 Pfiz­er dos­es that the Gov­ern­ment has now will be de­stroyed.

“The num­ber of vac­cines which we will have to de­stroy is 260,000 as I in­di­cat­ed. We will in­cin­er­ate...that is the method of de­struc­tion. It will not go to a pub­lic dump, it will be a process of in­cin­er­a­tion.”

Deyals­ingh spoke on Sat­ur­day at the Min­istry of Health's vir­tu­al me­dia con­fer­ence.

“As you know, the Pfiz­er vac­cines that we cur­rent­ly have in stock will be ex­pir­ing on Mon­day 28th Feb­ru­ary. We ex­pect our first tranch of 75,000 some­time next week. We had a meet­ing with the au­thor­i­ties on Thurs­day and it is go­ing to come in next week. So from Tues­day 1st of March, we will tem­porar­i­ly sus­pend our Pfiz­er vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme. We will be pulling stock back from the sys­tem, from around lunchtime on Mon­day.”

He said the sus­pen­sion of the Pfiz­er vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme will on­ly be for “just a cou­ple of days” un­til the new ship­ment ar­rives.

Deyals­ingh added that the boost­er pro­gramme will con­tin­ue as na­tion­als can be boost­ed with any vac­cine such as Sinopharm or John­son and John­son.

He al­so gave the num­ber of vac­cines (first and sec­ond dos­es, ad­di­tion­al pri­ma­ry dos­es and boost­er) by the brand that has been giv­en out in the coun­try.

*897,805 dos­es of Sinopharm

*241,167 dos­es of As­traZeneca

*328,444 dos­es of Pfiz­er

*56,339 dos­es of John­son and John­son

He al­so said that T&T can­not set up a vac­cine man­u­fac­tur­ing plant be­cause of its size. “Small coun­tries like us typ­i­cal­ly do not have that ca­pac­i­ty.”