Deputy Po­lit­i­cal Leader of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) David Lee said that Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley will not be al­lowed to get away with just an apol­o­gy for the vac­cine fi­as­co last Wednes­day.

Wednes­day was the first day of the walk-in vac­cine roll­out but hun­dreds of peo­ple turned up and had to be turned away. The Min­is­ter of Health apol­o­gised and the Gov­ern­ment in­stat­ed an al­pha­bet­i­cal sur­name ap­proach in­stead.

That too turned out poor­ly be­cause as hun­dreds turned up again, they on­ly then learned that on­ly 50 to 60 shots were be­ing dis­trib­uted per health cen­tre.

On Sat­ur­day the Prime Min­is­ter apol­o­gised for the Wednes­day de­ba­cle, call­ing it “one bad day”.

“The Prime Min­is­ter is not get­ting away so eas­i­ly,” Lee said at the UNC press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day.

“I want to let him know that the Op­po­si­tion and the coun­try will not let him get away with that apol­o­gy. What is one bad day?” Lee asked.

“One bad day in nor­mal peo­ple lives is when you in your car and you get a flat tyre and you change that tyre and you get an­oth­er flat tyre,” Lee said.

“But what we had and wit­nessed on Wednes­day, Thurs­day and Fri­day of this week could nev­er be called a bad day, what we wit­nessed was a fi­as­co,” he said.

Lee said the Gov­ern­ment was “ex­per­i­ment­ing on the el­der­ly”.

“It could nev­er be that the Prime Min­is­ter could come and apol­o­gise and tell this coun­try that it was hav­ing a bad day,” he said.

Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for Fyzbad and shad­ow health min­is­ter Dr Lack­ram Bodeo al­so con­demned the roll­out.

On Sat­ur­day the Prime Min­is­ter said that the coun­try did not have the num­ber of vac­cines need­ed to com­plete a mass roll­out.

“Un­for­tu­nate­ly T&T ex­pe­ri­enced a bizarre week,” he said.

Bo­doe said that in ad­di­tion to 79 deaths this week, there were some Gov­ern­ment blun­ders that could put more lives at risk.

Bo­doe said the Gov­ern­ment had a long time, al­most one year to pre­pare for this roll­out, yet in try­ing to ex­plain the Gov­ern­ment’s mis­step, the Prime Min­is­ter had to ad­mit that it was not equipped to han­dle a mass roll­out.

“And there­fore that ex­per­i­ment of try­ing to do too much with too lit­tle could on­ly have failed and it has failed,” he said.

“This speaks vol­umes for how this Gov­ern­ment op­er­at­ing in this COVID-19 cri­sis,” he said.

Bo­doe said that every time the Op­po­si­tion asked about the prepa­ra­tions for the vac­cine roll­out, they were told that the Gov­ern­ment had every­thing un­der con­trol.

“Last week showed clear­ly that this was not the case,” he said.

Bo­doe said that the Gov­ern­ment in­vit­ed “all and sundry” to get the vac­cine and then ap­peared shocked by the num­bers that turned up.

“Some have termed this strat­e­gy on Wednes­day as a “bluff and blame” strat­e­gy, “ he said, ask­ing if the Gov­ern­ment was try­ing to find some way to blame the pop­u­la­tion for turn­ing out.

“We can­not blame cit­i­zens for lin­ing up to get a vac­cine when there are so many deaths from COVID-19 on a dai­ly ba­sis and so few vac­cines,” Bo­doe said.

He al­so called for more de­tails of the deaths from COVID tak­ing place at homes and not in the State health care fa­cil­i­ties.