The news that T&T, along with oth­er Caribbean coun­tries, will in three weeks re­ceive COVID-19 vac­cines ap­proved by the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO) could not have come soon­er for this coun­try.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh re­cent­ly an­nounced that T&T ex­pects to re­ceive 33,600 dos­es of the As­traZeneca vac­cines and not the 100,000 orig­i­nal­ly promised for the first batch.

The dos­es are part of the Co­v­ax fa­cil­i­ty that T&T has signed on to and which has been be­set by con­stant de­lays.

There is a grow­ing un­ease about the Gov­ern­ment’s han­dling of the vac­cine roll­out, as we have watched our Caribbean broth­ers and sis­ters go about their busi­ness of vac­ci­nat­ing their pop­u­la­tions against the virus in the hope that lives and liveli­hoods could re­cov­er.

We know on­ly too well the sheer bac­cha­nal sur­round­ing the As­traZeneca vac­cines from In­dia and the ques­tion of WHO ap­proval sta­tus and whether of­fers of free vac­cines were made, re­ceived, turned down, or was all a big mix-up. 

At the end of the day, oth­ers have got­ten vac­cines from In­dia and T&T is not one of those coun­tries.

John­son and John­son’s sin­gle jab, which last week re­ceived WHO ap­proval, was yes­ter­day an­nounced as be­ing part of the Co­v­ax fa­cil­i­ty.

As­sis­tant Di­rec­tor of the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (PA­HO) Dr Jar­bas Bar­bosa da Sil­va Jr said his or­gan­i­sa­tion is work­ing with the coun­tries and the pro­duc­ers to ex­pe­dite the process. He said T&T is ready and wait­ing for the de­ploy­ment from the pro­duc­er to now take place.

Get­ting enough vac­cines to cre­ate herd im­mu­ni­ty must take place over a rel­a­tive­ly short pe­ri­od of time if, as the Gov­ern­ment has said, it trusts the sci­ence.

The rea­son speed is im­por­tant is be­cause you want to first­ly avoid new vari­ants be­ing pro­duced from mu­tat­ing virus. The oth­er re­al­i­ty is that un­less we have herd im­mu­ni­ty, we can­not stop the virus and it means we are all at risk and third­ly, we can­not con­tin­ue to live un­der the type of re­stric­tions that are chok­ing busi­ness­es. This will do per­ma­nent dam­age to the coun­try’s econ­o­my.

On­ly yes­ter­day, it was re­vealed that a new vari­ant in France could not be de­tect­ed by PCR test­ing. An omi­nous de­vel­op­ment.

The Gov­ern­ment must see that we are all in this fight to­geth­er and that means work­ing with all in­ter­est groups to get the best out­comes for the coun­try.

It is per­haps be­cause of the ur­gency of the mo­ment that the Su­per­mar­ket’ As­so­ci­a­tion has said it is work­ing to vac­ci­nate its 30,000 work­ers and ANSA McAL, the par­ent com­pa­ny of Guardian Me­dia, an­nounced its in­ten­tion to vac­ci­nate all its em­ploy­ees and their fam­i­lies sub­ject to the avail­abil­i­ty of vac­cines and in part­ner­ship with the Min­istry of Health.

Per­haps the ar­rival of vac­cines may lead to the Gov­ern­ment rolling back some of the re­stric­tions, like the sale of al­co­hol in restau­rants or hav­ing a drink at a bar.

We have man­aged to re­turn the coun­try’s COVID cas­es to low lev­els fol­low­ing the post-gen­er­al elec­tion spike and even the Christ­mas pe­ri­od showed that there has been no great in­crease.

The re­turn of peo­ple to the beach­es and even some lev­el of team sports were all good moves, now the Gov­ern­ment has to go fur­ther and open up more of the econ­o­my.