The Min­istry of Health is in­ves­ti­gat­ing re­ports of fraud­u­lent vac­ci­na­tion prac­tices by some mem­bers of the pop­u­la­tion.

Guardian Me­dia was made aware that some peo­ple were ly­ing about their vac­ci­na­tion sta­tus at vac­ci­na­tion sites to re­ceive ad­di­tion­al vac­cine dos­es or to fa­cil­i­tate vac­cine com­bi­na­tions of their choos­ing but not sup­port­ed un­der the cur­rent vac­ci­na­tion pol­i­cy in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

The prac­tice has al­so been not­ed by the Bar­keep­ers’ and Own­er’s As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Satesh Moonasar who con­firmed to Guardian Me­dia he has re­ceived such re­ports. He said bars op­er­at­ing as safe zones have no­ticed peo­ple pre­sent­ing two lo­cal vac­ci­na­tion cards, each with one dose of dif­fer­ent vac­cines on them.

Asked about the oc­cur­rence at Mon­day’s vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence by Guardian Me­dia, Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said the min­istry was ex­plor­ing the le­gal av­enues for pros­e­cu­tion against per­pe­tra­tors.

“We have been look­ing at that be­cause those same re­ports did come to us,” he said.

He said while these peo­ple may have been able to es­cape de­tec­tion due to a pa­per-based reg­is­tra­tion sys­tem at vac­ci­na­tion sites, they will be de­tect­ed once the dig­i­tal sys­tem is com­plet­ed.

“If there are any le­gal ram­i­fi­ca­tions for those per­sons we will deal that then,” he said.

How­ev­er, he asked that any­one with “hard in­for­ma­tion” on the oc­cur­rence come for­ward and share it with the min­istry.

“When­ev­er we ask for the hard in­for­ma­tion we nev­er get it. So if any­body has the hard in­for­ma­tion, the name of a per­son, a phone num­ber- please let us know. Let us work to­geth­er,” he said.