Dear Editor,
While many of the unvaccinated in the USA are being fired from their jobs, Minister Anthony has reported some good news that the vaccination rate in Guyana is inching up slowly as more and more resisters have seen the writing on the wall and are getting vaccinated. My friend Suresh in a chiding mood said, “Wha dem should do first, dem a do last.” I say better late than never! The Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dr. Narine Singh said, “Pregnant and breastfeeding women are among the groups of people who are no longer exempted from receiving the COVID-19 vaccines.” As of October 6, a total of 365,274 adults have received a Covid-19 vaccine, representing 71.2% of the adult population whereas 218,120 or 42.5% are fully inoculated. Vaccination of only 50% of prisoners is unacceptable.
One grave concern is the Minister said the current batch of Pfizer vaccines are slated to expire in November and December. We have spent billions of dollars on vaccines so I hope the Government has an aggressive plan to deploy all these vaccines so our money is not wasted. The unvaccinated must step up in larger numbers to make good use of our stock of vaccines, especially with 100,000 more doses of Pfizer received on Friday. A bit of good news is that Pfizer and BioNTech have asked federal regulators in the USA to authorize emergency use of their coronavirus vaccine for children ages 5 to 11. This is good news because it would help us to keep all children safe as we seek to open up all schools to deal with learning loss and accelerate learning for all. So nation, let’s make a big push to use up all the vaccines and reach herd immunity that would let us open up the country fully.
Sincerely,
Dr. Jerry Jailall
