Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has tak­en full re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the fail­ure of the Min­istry of Health’s mass vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme this week and he has un­re­served­ly apol­o­gised for the fi­as­co.

Speak­ing dur­ing a press con­fer­ence at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre in St Ann’s, on Sat­ur­day, the Prime Min­is­ter said “...You want some­body to blame? I take re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for that be­cause it is a Gov­ern­ment de­ci­sion, I am head of the Gov­ern­ment.”

He said the mass vac­ci­na­tion did not work and it will not be re­peat­ed be­cause the coun­try sim­ply does not have enough vac­cines to war­rant an open in­vi­ta­tion to the pop­u­la­tion.

“We are in no po­si­tion and there­fore, that ex­per­i­ment of try­ing to do too much with too lit­tle could on­ly have failed and it has failed, and we ac­knowl­edge that and I as Prime Min­is­ter un­re­served­ly apol­o­gise to those who thought to work with­in that pro­gramme and did in fact ex­pe­ri­ence what was the bad day of Wednes­day.”

The PM al­so de­fend­ed Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh say­ing, “If I didn’t have con­fi­dence in the Min­is­ter, he wouldn’t be sit­ting here.”

There have been nu­mer­ous calls for Deyals­ingh to re­sign or be fired since Wednes­day.

But the Prime Min­is­ter said he will not be dis­tract­ed by "one bad" in a year and a half of bat­tling the pan­dem­ic.

Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley at the COVID-19 media briefing at the Diplomatic Centre, St Ann’s, yesterday.

Courtesy Office of the Prime Minister

He said the mass vac­ci­na­tion, which saw thou­sands of el­der­ly cit­i­zens and peo­ple with non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases flock­ing to health cen­tres across the coun­try on Wednes­day was put in­to place be­cause there were many com­plaints about the vac­cine ap­point­ment sys­tem.

“I did say we had a prob­lem with the reg­is­tra­tion and peo­ple were com­plain­ing that they were hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ty get­ting through with the reg­is­tra­tion us­ing the tele­phone and an at­tempt was made to by­pass that bot­tle­neck by al­low­ing peo­ple to come with­out go­ing through the reg­is­tra­tion sys­tem,” he said.

Row­ley said the over­whelm­ing re­sponse to that ‘so­lu­tion’ cre­at­ed an­oth­er prob­lem, the over­crowd­ing from an over­whelm­ing re­sponse.

He said T&T has a bet­ter vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme than many Cari­com coun­tries. He said Haiti, which has a pop­u­la­tion of 11 mil­lion, has not vac­ci­nat­ed a sin­gle per­son.

But Row­ley said T&T was not ex­pect­ing any ‘boat­load’ of vac­cines in the im­me­di­ate fu­ture.

“What is more than like­ly go­ing to hap­pen is that we are go­ing to have a steady stream of quan­ti­ties that we are go­ing to have to man­age and that man­age­ment will not be mass vac­ci­na­tion where you come to sites and get vac­ci­nat­ed, which you thought was sup­posed to hap­pen last Wednes­day.”

The Prime Min­is­ter said when more vac­cines come in, the pop­u­la­tion will be seg­ment­ed to re­ceive their dos­es, so there will be no cir­cum­stance where peo­ple are called out for mass vac­cines.

But he said if enough vac­cines be­come avail­able, those who are anx­ious to get vac­ci­nat­ed should ex­pect to be in long lines.

“If we are com­ing out in large num­bers, it has to be long lines, be­cause you have to be spaced out, we all can’t be in front of the door and you can’t be in a small build­ing and the build­ing is full and of course, it makes more sense, we all shouldn’t go there on the same day. So those are things that the Min­istry will re­view and re­con­struct a plat­form to deal with in­ter­mit­tent ar­rivals of sig­nif­i­cant vol­umes but not vol­umes that can gen­er­ate mass vac­ci­na­tion.”

200,000 Sinopharm vac­cines in T&T by to­mor­row

The Prime Min­is­ter said by to­mor­row, the coun­try will re­ceive its sec­ond ship­ment of the Sinopharm vac­cine.

Those 200,000 dos­es will be used to give 50,000 peo­ple their first dose, while the re­main­ing 150,000 dos­es will be kept as the sec­ond dose for those who have al­ready re­ceived one dose.

This ship­ment means the coun­try has so far re­ceived 300,000 dos­es of Sinopharm­—the first 100,000 hav­ing been de­liv­ered as a gift.

Row­ley said the Gov­ern­ment has or­dered 500,000 Sinopharm dos­es in to­tal.

In a Face­book post on Sat­ur­day Chi­nese am­bas­sador to T&T, Fang Qiu stat­ed, "Heart­ened to know that the 200,000 Sinopharm vac­cines pro­cured by the T&T Gov­ern­ment are on the way! This is gonna be the first de­liv­ered batch of pro­cured Chi­nese COVID-19 vac­cines in the Caribbean. A big plus to the mass vac­ci­na­tion dri­ve. Chi­na con­tin­ues to stand to­geth­er with T&T against the pan­dem­ic."

The PM al­so said the coun­try can al­so look for­ward to a new ship­ment from the CO­V­AX fa­cil­i­ty at the end of Ju­ly and a ship­ment from the African Trust at the end of Au­gust.

Ac­cord­ing to the Prime Min­is­ter, while there has been a lot of pub­lic chat­ter on the do­na­tion of vac­cines from the Unit­ed States, there is still no con­fir­ma­tion of when those vac­cines will be made avail­able.

“As I speak to you, I can con­firm to you, I have been in con­ver­sa­tions with a lot of peo­ple on this mat­ter, the fi­nal ap­proval for move­ment of the dos­es have not yet come,” he said.

The Prime Min­is­ter urged the pop­u­la­tion to stay the course to re­duce the num­ber of COVID-19 cas­es but said the coun­try was not ready yet for the re­open­ing of its econ­o­my as case num­bers are still too high.

He said he was hop­ing to re­open the con­struc­tion sec­tor, but cas­es were still too high for that mea­sure to be put in place.

He al­so gave an up­date on the re­open­ing of the coun­try’s bor­der which has been closed since March 2020, say­ing the coun­try is still on track to have a re­open­ing in four to six weeks.

Row­ley said the salary re­lief grants be­ing of­fered to cit­i­zens will be ex­tend from May to June.