Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The Gov­ern­ment is con­tin­u­ing its search for a coun­try to do­nate T&T’s un­used Ox­ford-As­traZeneca COVID-19 vac­cines be­fore they ex­pire and Min­is­ter of For­eign and Cari­com Af­fairs Dr Amery Browne is hop­ing that news could be shared by ear­ly next week. 

“Dis­cus­sions are now at a crit­i­cal stage, and I hope to be able to share a full up­date with you ear­ly next week,” Browne told Guardian Me­dia up­on en­quiries in­to the process. 

He said progress is be­ing made and the Gov­ern­ment will not let the dos­es ex­pire on its hands. 

“Ex­cel­lent progress is be­ing made via our diplo­mat­ic con­tacts, and as we in­tend to keep our ex­pressed com­mit­ment to be as gen­er­ous as oth­ers were with us,” he said.

“Trinidad and To­ba­go is not in the busi­ness of hoard­ing life-sav­ing vac­cines, and whilst we wish all our peo­ple to con­sid­er be­ing vac­ci­nat­ed as soon as pos­si­ble, we al­so must do our part to en­sure that the peo­ple of this en­tire re­gion are as safe as pos­si­ble from COVID-19 in all its dead­ly forms and that all dos­es are put to their in­tend­ed use,” he added

T&T has re­ceived a to­tal of 277,330 Ox­ford-As­traZeneca/Co­v­ishield dos­es so far. They in­clude do­na­tions from Bar­ba­dos, In­dia, St Vin­cent and the Grenadines, Bermu­da, Grena­da, and Cana­da. It al­so ac­quired the largest amount through the CO­V­AX fa­cil­i­ty which it bought in­to in Sep­tem­ber 2020. An ex­act fig­ure of dos­es to be do­nat­ed has not yet been di­vulged but it can be es­ti­mat­ed to be around 30,000 dos­es. That’s if all the dos­es yet to be ad­min­is­tered which aren’t re­served for sec­ond dos­es will be do­nat­ed. 

The up­take in the As­traZeneca dos­es dwin­dled as oth­er vac­cine brands were made avail­able to the pub­lic. In re­cent days the up­take dwin­dled to al­most nil ac­cord­ing to the Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh on Wednes­day. 

“The As­traZeneca num­bers have been very very low. Some days you do none, some days you do 20, some days you do 11, some days you do nine,” he said.

But with an ex­piry date of about two months away, the gov­ern­ment de­cid­ed to do­nate them in­stead of let­ting them waste.

In light of this, the Min­istry of Health stopped ad­min­is­ter­ing first dos­es of the vac­cine yes­ter­day. With a six to eight week in­ter­val be­tween dos­es, this was to en­sure that peo­ple will be guar­an­teed a sec­ond dose be­fore it ex­pires.