(Trinidad Express) – Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley has given an unreserved apology to the nation, and in particular the elderly, for the chaos at health facilities between Wednesday and Friday this week.
“As head of the government, I take the responsibility for how the Government goes about its business. I take responsibility”, Dr Rowley said at yesterday’s Covid-19 media briefing.
“Wednesday was a bad day. It was a bad day in that the Government through its agencies – its Prime Minister, its minister, its infrastructure tried to do too much with too little. It was a bad idea to try to solve the problem of the registration programme by simply removing that structure of registration and replacing it with one can call now a ‘mass vaccination’ exercise,” said the prime minister.
He noted that that country was in no position to carry out mass vaccination.
“That experiment of trying to do too much with too little could have only failed and it has failed. We acknowledge that. I, as Prime minister unreservedly apologise to those who sought to work within that programme and experience what was a bad day on Wednesday. This has nothing to do with the ability of the technical staff to provide us with clinical and scientific information about the virus. This was solely at the level of the Government, and how we try to do as much and as quickly as we can. Of all the things we tried to do this one did not work,” he said.
Dr Rowley said he particularly apologised to the elderly, who came out thinking that they could put themselves through the pain, inconvenience and disappointment and not receiving the vaccine.
In moving forward from the failure, the Prime Minister said that there would not be a repeat of that situation and he was confident that the future days would go well.
“I am in this for the long haul, and I intend to see the country through on a place of safe landing on this. So, I am not going to be distracted by any intermittent failure, not unreasonable expectational responses,” he said. “I am confident that the future days will go very well.”
He declared that the vaccination programme in Trinidad and Tobago is “as good as, or better than most certainly in the Caricom and worldwide.”
Rowley said that there will be a steady stream of quantities of vaccines that will be distributed to the population over the next weeks and months.
He said the Government will not again invite the population out for vaccines that they do not have, and to cause crowds.
He announced that in addition to the shipment of 200,000 Sinopharm vaccines to be received by Monday, that an addition 8,000 vaccines were to be received from Grenada and another 5,500 vaccines from St Vincent.
