As pri­ma­ry school stu­dents re­turn to phys­i­cal class­rooms fol­low­ing the East­er hol­i­days, the Min­istry of Health is clos­er to ac­quir­ing COVID-19 vac­cines for that age group.

While the Min­istry does not yet have a date for when the vac­cines will ar­rive, Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh says it re­ceived a draft le­gal agree­ment from the Gov­ern­ment of Spain for a do­na­tion of Pfiz­er-BioN­Tech vac­cines ap­proved for chil­dren ages five-11.

At the Min­istry's week­ly COVID-19 Up­date, Deyals­ingh ex­plained that all vac­cines en­ter­ing the coun­try, whether through pur­chase or do­na­tion, come with le­gal hur­dles to cross. The draft agree­ment is now with the Min­istry of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and Le­gal Af­fairs for vet­ting. Once that Min­istry ap­proves it, the process moves the lo­gis­ti­cal arrange­ments of get­ting the vac­cines in­to the coun­try.

While the Gov­ern­ment plans to vac­ci­nate younger chil­dren, the dai­ly vac­ci­na­tion dropped to a pal­try es­ti­mat­ed av­er­age of 400. Up to yes­ter­day, there were 709,616 vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple, rep­re­sent­ing 50.7 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion, with 146,889 peo­ple tak­ing boost­er shots.
“We con­tin­ue to urge peo­ple to get vac­ci­nat­ed. It could re­al­ly save your life. At this stage of the game, even two deaths, three deaths, four, five a day; those num­bers are still avoid­able. They can be sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duced be­cause the same trend we are see­ing is that the ma­jor­i­ty of those deaths are peo­ple who are un­vac­ci­nat­ed,” Deyals­ingh said.

While a com­mon rea­son for re­ject­ing the vac­cine was that some peo­ple re­cov­ered from COVID-19, Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor of the Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion Dr Av­ery Hinds said that pro­tec­tion de­creas­es with time. While vac­cine-in­duced im­mu­ni­ty con­tributes to the low­er spread dur­ing this phase of the pan­dem­ic, Hinds said so does nat­ur­al im­mu­ni­ty to the cur­rent COVID vari­ant cir­cu­lat­ing.

How­ev­er, he said that nat­ur­al im­mu­ni­ty wanes faster than vac­cine-in­duced im­mu­ni­ty. Even with the vac­cines, there is a need for boost­ers in cer­tain age groups and phys­i­ol­o­gy.
“There is a con­tri­bu­tion of those who have been pre­vi­ous­ly in­fect­ed and are cur­rent­ly im­mune but just bear­ing in mind that con­tri­bu­tion will de­cline as nat­ur­al im­mu­ni­ty wanes,” Hinds said.

Re­porter: Kevon Felmine