Dis­tress­ing scenes of hun­dreds of peo­ple, many of them el­der­ly and in­firm, lined up out­side health cen­tres for the sec­ond straight day yes­ter­day, is proof of the abysmal fail­ure of the walk-in vac­ci­na­tion sys­tem just in­tro­duced by the Min­istry of Health.

The arrange­ment has spawned most­ly chaos and con­fu­sion and it did not help that yes­ter­day, to add in­sult to the in­jury al­ready in­flict­ed on these se­nior cit­i­zens the day be­fore, there was a de­ci­sion to ad­min­is­ter on­ly a lim­it­ed num­ber of vac­cines at each health cen­tre.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, who was up­front and ear­ly with his mea cul­pas on the first day of the vac­cine fi­as­co, was not as forth­com­ing on day two about the fail­ure of the al­pha­bet sys­tem. He opt­ed out of an in­ter­view on Guardian Me­dia’s CNC3 late yes­ter­day, pass­ing on an op­por­tu­ni­ty to ex­plain this lat­est vac­ci­na­tion fail­ure.

But Mr Deyals­ingh will have to own up to the fact that there have been a host of chal­lenges with this most crit­i­cal el­e­ment of the vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme. Ac­cess­ing ap­point­ments, whether by tele­phone and on­line, re­sult­ed in frus­tra­tion and fu­til­i­ty for most. Walk-ins have been even more dis­as­trous.

How­ev­er, the chaos of the past two days could have been avoid­ed by look­ing be­yond the pub­lic sec­tor. Through­out this pub­lic health cri­sis, which has brought the health sys­tem close to break­ing point, more use could have been made of the re­sources and ex­per­tise avail­able in the pri­vate sec­tor.

If there is a key take­away from this pan­dem­ic for pol­i­cy and de­ci­sion-mak­ers, it is that more of an ef­fort must be made to en­gage with busi­ness­es and civ­il so­ci­ety. Gov­ern­ment and the cor­po­rate sec­tor need to adapt to a new way of work­ing to­geth­er that ac­tive­ly seeks out and lever­ages pri­vate ini­tia­tives for pub­lic ben­e­fit.

The COVID-19 vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme presents that op­por­tu­ni­ty.

The un­prece­dent­ed part­ner­ships be­tween gov­ern­ment agen­cies and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies to de­vel­op COVID-19 vac­cines, treat­ments and di­ag­nos­tics, have shown to the world what is pos­si­ble through pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ships.

To get past this week’s vac­ci­na­tion fi­as­co, it is im­por­tant to har­ness the con­sid­er­able ca­pa­bil­i­ties, ex­per­tise and knowl­edge that re­side across the pri­vate sec­tor to help meet the vac­cine cam­paign’s pri­or­i­ties.

There is sig­nif­i­cant man­pow­er, huge dis­tri­b­u­tion ware­hous­es and oth­er fa­cil­i­ties that can be of­fered for da­ta stor­age, ap­point­ment sched­ul­ing, de­liv­ery of sup­plies to clin­ics and hos­pi­tals, in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy and com­mu­ni­ca­tions ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

Ur­gent­ly need­ed, not on­ly in re­sponse to the is­sues of the last few days, but be­cause our over­all COVID re­sponse needs to be fine-tuned, is a pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship that em­braces the ‘all hands-on deck’ ap­proach.

There is noth­ing new any­where in the world about com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ment agen­cies work­ing to­geth­er to tack­le na­tion­al chal­lenges and prob­lems, so it is strange that more than a year in­to the pan­dem­ic, there have not been more join­ing of forces to fight COVID-19.

The Vac­ci­nate to Op­er­ate ini­tia­tive, which has tar­get­ed work­ers in var­i­ous pro­duc­tive sec­tors for vac­ci­na­tions, has been suc­cess­ful in just a few days. That suc­cess should now be repli­cat­ed across all oth­er phas­es of the na­tion­al vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme.