Yes­ter­day’s an­nounce­ment by Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh that his min­istry was prepar­ing it­self for the even­tu­al re­ceipt and dis­tri­b­u­tion of a COVID-19 vac­cine is wel­come news for a na­tion that has suf­fered so much for so long as a re­sult of the pan­dem­ic.

Make no bones about it, like the rest of the world, this pan­dem­ic has cost T&T in both trea­sure and blood.

More than 100 of our cit­i­zens have lost their lives as a re­sult of it, hun­dreds of busi­ness­es are no more, thou­sands are un­em­ployed as a re­sult and bil­lions of dol­lars have been lost.

So the news of the two re­cent suc­cess­ful tri­als of COVID-19 vac­cine could not have come ear­li­er for the world and T&T.

Ac­cord­ing to the Min­is­ter of Health, this coun­try is aim­ing to re­ceive dos­es from the vac­cine de­vel­oped by the Amer­i­can phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny Mod­er­na on two main grounds. The first is that it has proven more ef­fi­ca­cious in the pre­ven­tion of the virus than Pfiz­er’s ver­sion and sec­ond­ly, it does not re­quire the ex­treme cold tem­per­a­tures that Pfiz­er’s vac­cine needs.

Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh said the ad­van­tage of the Mod­er­na vac­cine is that it can be stored at much high­er tem­per­a­tures than the Pfiz­er vac­cine.

The Pfiz­er vac­cine needs to be stored be­tween -70 to -80 de­grees Cel­cius, a lo­gis­ti­cal chal­lenge for most coun­tries. How­ev­er, the Mod­er­na vac­cine can be stored at around -20 de­grees Cel­cius for up to six months. The Mod­er­na vac­cine can al­so be thawed and kept be­tween two to eight de­grees Cel­cius for 30 days and is sta­ble at room tem­per­a­ture for 12 hours.

Lo­gis­ti­cal­ly, Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh said it would be eas­i­er to store and dis­trib­ute the Mod­er­na vac­cines and the min­istry has al­so cho­sen three sites to store it.

While we ap­plaud the min­istry’s ef­forts to en­sure that it is ready and or­gan­ised for when the vac­cine reach­es our shores, we warn cit­i­zens that now is not the time to let our guards down, as there re­mains a re­al dan­ger to our econ­o­my and the health and safe­ty of cit­i­zens.

Hav­ing said that, the Gov­ern­ment must start to po­si­tion the coun­try for the post-COVID-19 world.

T&T has been forced to change in many ways. Digi­ti­sa­tion and the use of tech­nol­o­gy promise to make us a more ef­fi­cient so­ci­ety, but to tru­ly achieve this re­quires ma­jor changes in leg­is­la­tion to al­low for dig­i­tal pay­ment, a move­ment to a cash­less so­ci­ety and a relook at busi­ness­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly those in dis­tri­b­u­tion and re­tail.

We must al­so con­sid­er how we fash­ion a new econ­o­my, with a world that is less de­pen­dent on fos­sil fu­els and where our ma­jor com­modi­ties of oil, gas and petro­chem­i­cals are like­ly to be less valu­able to the world in the not too dis­tant fu­ture.

Now is a time of guard­ed op­ti­mism, but what is al­so re­quired is in­spi­ra­tional lead­er­ship.