The on­go­ing con­flict be­tween T&T and In­dia over COVID-19 vac­cines seems to have been put to rest yes­ter­day with a face-to-face meet­ing be­tween In­dia High Com­mis­sion­er Arun Ku­mar Sahu and For­eign Af­fairs Min­is­ter Dr Amery Browne. In a joint state­ment there­after, both sides said the dis­cus­sions were “very can­did, friend­ly and com­pre­hen­sive.”

It is good that fi­nal­ly, a com­mit­ment that the two coun­tries will work “even clos­er to­geth­er” on this trou­bling mat­ter of vac­cines has been ar­rived at.

The gen­e­sis of the pub­lic spat be­tween two coun­tries that have his­tor­i­cal­ly had good re­la­tions had its gen­e­sis in the Prime Min­is­ter’s con­ver­sa­tions last Thurs­day, when he all but ac­cused the High Com­mis­sion­er of talk­ing to every­one be­sides the Gov­ern­ment about vac­cines.

Per­haps now that this has been re­solved, the coun­try will see the ben­e­fit of the of­fer of the vac­cines made by the In­di­an Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Mo­di from which 72 coun­tries have al­ready ben­e­fit­ted.

The un­cer­tain­ty about the vac­cines and their ar­rival in this coun­try has left the door open for al­le­ga­tions of all sorts. The lat­est is that rel­a­tives of the Health Min­is­ter are in­volved in a com­pa­ny that is im­port­ing vac­cines from Hong Kong, an al­le­ga­tion the min­is­ter has de­nied.

Trinidad and To­ba­go leaves it­self open to be­come the laugh­ing stock of the re­gion as we nav­i­gate the wa­ters of get­ting vac­cines.

No door should be left un­opened in the quest to get vac­cines and to en­sure that T&T can re­turn to some sem­blance of nor­mal­cy.

The coun­try has been in a state of lock­down and shut­down for far too long. No one is say­ing we should go back to how things were be­fore COVID but in a re­al sense, peo­ple are suf­fer­ing and the on­ly way to ad­dress this is by en­sur­ing cit­i­zens are safe to go about their dai­ly busi­ness.

Across the Caribbean, al­most every coun­try has al­ready vac­ci­nat­ed thou­sands of their cit­i­zens. Bar­ba­dos and Do­mini­ca were in the en­vi­able po­si­tion of hav­ing enough vac­cines to share with their CARI­COM coun­ter­parts.

How­ev­er, it seems that com­mon sense is be­ing trumped by games­man­ship and pol­i­tics in this coun­try’s quest to get vac­cines. For ex­am­ple, three weeks ago the coun­try was al­so told that T&T would ben­e­fit from vac­cines from the African Union. Where are those vac­cines and what is the sta­tus of what has been promised?

Now we are hear­ing about Chi­na’s Sinopharm vac­cine. One un­der­stands that vac­cines are now in short sup­ply. Just last week the UK in­di­cat­ed that it had re­ceived on­ly half of what it paid for from the Serum In­sti­tute of In­dia. But that short­age should not dri­ve us to crit­i­cism of those who have the pow­er to help us.

We can­not sit by and hope that this bad dream will go away.

There are op­tions avail­able. If pri­vate sec­tor com­pa­nies have the ca­pac­i­ty to help then let them help. But we can­not af­ford to wait any longer for the vac­cines need­ed to achieve the herd im­mu­ni­ty nec­es­sary to pro­tect the na­tion from the COVID men­ace.