One med­ical ex­pert has sound­ed a warn­ing that the coun­try's low COVID-19 vac­ci­na­tion rate could lead to the emer­gence of a new vari­ant of the virus.

Speak­ing on CNC3's The Morn­ing Brew pro­gram, Pro­fes­sor Har­i­ha­ran See­tara­man, of The UWI's Crit­i­cal Care Med­i­cine De­part­ment, ex­pressed con­cern over vac­cine hes­i­tan­cy and its im­pact.

Ac­cord­ing to Pro­fes­sor See­tara­man, da­ta has shown that re­luc­tance to the jab fu­els more cas­es, which can lead to more mu­ta­tions.

“Even in a small coun­try like ours, if we have a ma­jor pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion who are un­vac­ci­nat­ed that is go­ing to be a recipe for de­vel­op­ment of a new vari­ant,” he ex­plained. “I don’t want that to be called as a Trinidad vari­ant, but it is pos­si­ble.”

Pro­fes­sor See­tara­man main­tained that con­trary to re­ports and al­le­ga­tions, the COVID vac­cine re­mains the best de­fence against the virus.

“The COVID vac­cine is one of the very well test­ed vac­cines.  Even with the very well test­ed vac­cine, if you re­mem­ber the Phase Three tri­als which came ear­li­er for Pfiz­er and Mod­er­na, it was 93 per­cent and 95 per­cent,” he not­ed.

Mean­while, the Health Min­istry has an­nounced two more cas­es of the Delta vari­ant.

Last evening, the min­istry con­firmed two ad­di­tion­al cas­es of the COVID-19 Delta vari­ant of con­cern, there­by push­ing to five the to­tal num­ber of con­firmed cas­es of the high­ly trans­mis­si­ble vari­ant.

Ac­cord­ing to the min­istry, the fourth and fifth pa­tients re­cent­ly re­turned to Trinidad from the Unit­ed States and Guyana, re­spec­tive­ly.  As per ex­ist­ing quar­an­tine pro­to­cols, both per­sons pro­vid­ed neg­a­tive PCR tests, which had been tak­en 72-hours pri­or to ar­rival.

As a re­sult of their pos­i­tive COVID-19 re­sults from swabs tak­en af­ter ar­rival, both pa­tients were iso­lat­ed at a state step-down fa­cil­i­ty.  The pa­tients will re­main in iso­la­tion un­til they meet the en­hanced dis­charge cri­te­ria for per­sons with COVID-19 vari­ants of con­cern.