Loyse Vin­cent

To­ba­go health of­fi­cials have said that they have not been able to vac­ci­nate a num­ber of To­bag­o­ni­ans who have pre­sent­ed for vac­ci­na­tion due to very high blood pres­sure read­ings.

They said peo­ple in the tourism and con­struc­tion sec­tors and those re­spon­si­ble for loved ones who re­side at Long Term Care Fa­cil­i­ties (homes for the aged) are al­so show­ing high lev­els of vac­cine hes­i­tan­cy.

The an­nounce­ment was made by TRHA Pri­ma­ry Health Care Man­ag­er Dr Rox­anne Mitchell, who heads To­ba­go’s vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme.

Us­ing the peo­ple vac­ci­nat­ed in the tourism and con­struc­tion sec­tors as a sam­ple group Mitchell said the sec­tors were iden­ti­fied as pri­or­i­ty groups and a tem­po­rary vac­ci­na­tion site was es­tab­lished at the Mag­dale­na Gran Ho­tel.

She said the dur­ing the vac­ci­na­tion process, which ran from June 12 to 18, some 1,263 peo­ple were seen but a num­ber of them could not be ad­min­is­tered the vac­cine be­cause of high blood pres­sure.

“The to­tal num­ber with el­e­vat­ed blood pres­sure above sys­tolic 160 and di­as­tolic 90 we had 122 which is 9.7% of the per­son at­tend­ing with el­e­vat­ed blood pres­sure we had blood pres­sures of 200 and some­thing over 100 and some­thing some claim­ing that as far as they knew they were not hy­per­ten­sive.”

She said there were dai­ly num­bers of 24 peo­ple in one day and 39 on an­oth­er day who pre­sent­ed with high blood pres­sure.

And these peo­ple were asked to go home to get their med­ica­tion or take their med­ica­tion if they brought it with them and if they were not able to suc­cess­ful­ly bring down the per­son’s blood pres­sure they were not vac­ci­nat­ed.

“A cou­ple per­sons have el­e­vat­ed blood pres­sure af­ter they re­ceived the vac­cine so if you start with a high blood pres­sure, post-vac­ci­na­tion your blood pres­sure will go up so as to avoid per­sons hit­ting a par­tic­u­lar thresh­old for de­vel­op­ing com­pli­ca­tions the vac­cine will not be ad­min­is­tered.”

Ac­cord­ing to Mitchell, peo­ple who are hy­per­ten­sive are asked to en­sure that their blood pres­sure is as con­trolled as pos­si­ble, to be­gin with in or­der to re­ceive the vac­cine as this re­duces the risk of the in­di­vid­ual de­vel­op­ing com­pli­ca­tions like heart at­tacks, strokes or seizures.

And if a per­son is ad­min­is­tered the vac­cine and their blood pres­sure shows a dan­ger­ous in­crease they will be ad­mit­ted to the hos­pi­tal un­til it is con­trolled.

Ac­cord­ing to Mitchell, there is al­so a high lev­el of vac­cine hes­i­tan­cy even with­in the tourism and con­struc­tion sec­tors, that have asked to be giv­en pri­or­i­ty, in the vac­ci­na­tion ex­er­cise.

“There are agen­cies who have sent for­ward a list with the names of all their em­ploy­ees, when we call them for vac­ci­na­tions those per­sons say they were not in­ter­est­ed in the vac­cine,” Mitchell said

And al­though the coun­try’s con­struc­tion sec­tor is sched­uled to be re-opened in ear­ly Ju­ly the re­sponse has not been en­cour­ag­ing.

Mitchell said: “At the be­gin­ning of the process, 1006 peo­ple reg­is­tered from the con­struc­tion in­dus­try we have not seen half of that yet step­ping for­ward with re­gard to re­ceiv­ing the vac­cine so there’s still some hes­i­tan­cy.”

Mitchell al­so pub­licly ap­pealed for the next of kin of el­der­ly peo­ple at the is­land’s Long-term Care Fa­cil­i­ties to sign con­sent forms for their loved ones to be vac­ci­nat­ed. She said, “thus far on­ly 38 res­i­dents were vac­ci­nat­ed on the is­land.”

So far, a to­tal of 2,952 peo­ple have been ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed in To­ba­go and 9,033 peo­ple have re­ceived the first dose of vac­ci­na­tion.