The first phase of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s vac­cine roll­out from the 33,600 dos­es re­ceived via the CO­V­AX fa­cil­i­ty be­gins to­day and among those to be vac­ci­nat­ed are Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh and Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley—at least that’s what the coun­try was told at an April 1 news con­fer­ence.

The 33,600 dos­es of As­traZeneca vac­cines have an ex­piry date of May 31. Giv­en that the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion has in­di­cat­ed that the sec­ond dose must be giv­en 8-12 weeks af­ter re­ceipt of the first, it means health of­fi­cials have two op­tions. It is ei­ther they use all 33,600 shots to ad­min­is­ters both dos­es, in which case they will be able to ad­min­is­ter the vac­cines to 16,800 peo­ple, or they ad­min­is­ter the 33,600 jabs as first does, in which case they will have to pray that the sec­ond batch ar­rives as promised next month.

The sad re­al­i­ty is that from the get-go on the vac­cine is­sue, it’s been a hit and miss ap­proach tak­en by the lo­cal au­thor­i­ties. Per­haps they were so over­joyed by in­ter­na­tion­al praise of this coun­try’s han­dling of the COVID virus that vac­cines may have been the last thing on any­one’s minds. So al­though we have been hear­ing that T&T had got on the vac­cine train since Sep­tem­ber last year, it seems that oth­er coun­tries were well ahead of us, even our Cari­com neigh­bours, some of whom have al­ready vac­ci­nat­ed tens of thou­sands of cit­i­zens com­pared to T&T.

It’s a full year in­to the pan­dem­ic and worse yet, al­though the pub­lic dis­cus­sion on the ac­qui­si­tion has been on­go­ing for sev­er­al months, the Min­istry of Health is now mov­ing to set up a sys­tem for per­sons want­i­ng to be vac­ci­nat­ed.

Health of­fi­cials have spent months in the pub­lic’s face about prepa­ra­tions for the fight against the dis­ease and the vac­cines, Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer, et al, but are yet to pro­duce a work­able vac­ci­na­tion plan.

World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion sta­tis­tics are clear, for vac­cines to have an im­pact there must be herd im­mu­ni­ty. This means T&T would need 1,476,143 dos­es to in­oc­u­late 738,071 peo­ple to hit the 75% of the pop­u­la­tion nec­es­sary.

But at even 1,000 dos­es a day, if the en­tire vac­cine-el­i­gi­ble pop­u­la­tion was to be in­oc­u­lat­ed, it would take over four years!

Even as the vac­cine roll­out be­gins to­day, there are con­cerns about the in­creas­ing num­ber of deaths and re­cent spike in cas­es. But the fact is that with­out some kind of clear Gov­ern­ment vac­ci­na­tion plan, there is no sense of when life will re­turn to nor­mal. The threat of a sec­ond lock­down now looms and many still suf­fer­ing from the eco­nom­ic im­pact of COVID-19 see no light at the end of the tun­nel. Soon, the coun­try will know the fall­out from gath­er­ings this past East­er week­end, which may prompt ei­ther a sec­ond lock­down or fur­ther roll­back of health pro­to­cols now in place.

If one were to as­sess the Gov­ern­ment on the vac­ci­na­tion of cit­i­zens, how­ev­er, it has failed mis­er­ably. They have no one else to blame. Clear­ly, they need to ad­mit they need help to en­sure that the mech­a­nism to vac­ci­nate the pop­u­la­tion is ramped up.