Es­cap­ing the sti­fling grip of COVID-19 re­quires herd im­mu­ni­ty which should be the main ob­jec­tive of T&T’s pub­lic health au­thor­i­ties. That means en­sur­ing that enough peo­ple de­vel­op im­mu­ni­ty, ei­ther from vac­ci­na­tion or past in­fec­tion, to stop the coro­n­avirus from eas­i­ly jump­ing from per­son to per­son.

A well planned and care­ful­ly im­ple­ment­ed vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme aimed at im­mu­niz­ing at least 70 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion seems the ob­vi­ous choice, which is why it is per­plex­ing that greater ef­forts aren’t be­ing made to se­cure more vac­cine dos­es.

The na­tion has been hear­ing from Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh that the main op­tion is the CO­V­AX fa­cil­i­ty from which an ini­tial 100,000 to 120,000 dos­es of the Ox­ford-As­traZeneca COVID-19 vac­cine has al­ready been or­dered. How­ev­er, those vac­cines will be enough for just about 50,000 peo­ple—way off the num­bers re­quired in our pop­u­la­tion of 1.4 mil­lion for herd im­mu­ni­ty.

Apart from that, save for the 2,000 dos­es that were a gift from Bar­ba­dos, there seem to be no con­crete arrange­ments to se­cure ad­di­tion­al vac­cines.

In­stead, there ap­pears to be some ret­i­cence about go­ing the route of the Bar­ba­dos and Do­mini­ca gov­ern­ments which have al­ready ob­tained As­traZeneca vac­cines. Their con­sign­ments of the made in In­dia Co­v­ishield vac­cines ar­rived this week.

T&T, on the oth­er hand, has been slow off the start­ing blocks and on­ly on Wednes­day start­ed ad­min­is­ter­ing first dos­es to front­line health work­ers from the vac­cines gift­ed by the Mia Mot­t­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion in Bar­ba­dos.

Yes­ter­day, even as Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley was be­ing praised by Dr Tedros Ghe­breye­sus, Di­rec­tor-Gen­er­al of the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO), for his han­dling of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, in­for­ma­tion was com­ing to hand of some hes­i­tan­cy in ac­cept­ing vac­cines from In­dia.

Talks have on­ly just be­gun with In­dia about get­ting vac­cines from that coun­try, nev­er mind that our na­tions have en­joyed al­most six decades of strong diplo­mat­ic re­la­tions.

The ex­tra cau­tion in seek­ing WHO val­i­da­tion be­fore ful­ly ex­plor­ing In­dia’s As­traZeneca op­tion seems un­nec­es­sary when one con­sid­ers that In­dia is a vac­cine pow­er­house, pro­duc­ing 60 per cent of the world's vac­cines. The Co­v­ishield vac­cine is man­u­fac­tured by Bharat Biotech, a vac­cine mak­er with a port­fo­lio of 16 vac­cines and ex­ports to 123 coun­tries.

T&T needs to step up its vac­cine game, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en per­sis­tent con­cerns about dis­crim­i­na­tion in dis­tri­b­u­tions around the world. To date, on­ly 10 coun­tries have ad­min­is­tered 75 per cent of all COVID-19 vac­ci­na­tions.

Ear­li­er this week, Unit­ed Na­tions Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al An­to­nio Guter­res spoke out about “wild­ly un­even and un­fair” dis­tri­b­u­tion and called for an ur­gent Glob­al Vac­ci­na­tion Plan to en­sure a more eq­ui­table sys­tem.

In these cir­cum­stances risks end­ing up at the back of the queue if it doesn’t step up its vac­cine ac­qui­si­tion game. There is in-coun­try ca­pac­i­ty to store sub­stan­tial quan­ti­ties of dos­es—more than 300,000 at 2 to 8 de­grees, 200,000 at -20 de­grees and 200,000 at -70 de­grees Cel­sius—so there is no need to set­tle for a small amount.

Too much hes­i­ta­tion on the vac­cine front could be risky.