Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh is as­sur­ing the pub­lic that the triva­lent vac­cine be­ing ad­min­is­tered in the pub­lic health sec­tor is safe and ef­fec­tive.

Dur­ing Sat­ur­day’s COVID-19 brief­ing, he said, “There are some is­sues with the quadri­va­lent vac­cine which we do not use in the pub­lic sec­tor that are caus­ing some cause for alarm. In the pub­lic sec­tor in T&T, we have al­ways used the triva­lent vac­cine.”

Lament­ing the de­clin­ing num­bers of peo­ple avail­ing them­selves of the free flu vac­cine, Deyals­ingh said at the end of week four, on­ly 6,963 vac­cines had so far been dis­pensed.

He said, “We were aim­ing by now, to be de­liv­er­ing about 10,000 dos­es of vac­cines.”

To date, a to­tal of 27,951 dos­es of the flu vac­cine have been giv­en out, but Deyals­ingh said the au­thor­i­ties had been hop­ing this fig­ure would have been be­tween 35-40,000.

He said fol­low­ing the on­set of fall and win­ter sea­sons in the larg­er coun­tries and with repa­tri­a­tion flights bring­ing home peo­ple from the US, Cana­da and the UK, “They can al­so be bring­ing home the in­fluen­za virus that is cir­cu­lat­ing in the North­ern Hemi­sphere at this point.

“It is ab­solute­ly vi­tal for key sec­tors of the pop­u­la­tion, es­pe­cial­ly the el­der­ly with pre-ex­ist­ing con­di­tions such as di­a­betes, hy­per­ten­sion, obe­si­ty, asth­ma, can­cer…those con­di­tions where it caus­es your im­mune sys­tem to be not as strong as it nor­mal­ly is in a reg­u­lar healthy per­son.

“Chil­dren be­tween the ages of six months to five years…our preg­nant women, please get vac­ci­nat­ed. The vac­cine is per­fect­ly safe for both you and your ba­by re­gard­less of the month of your preg­nan­cy.”

He said they were aim­ing to get the num­bers up to about 10,000 vac­cines per week.