(Trinidad Express) – Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley yesterday announced that effective mid-January, all Government employees will have to be vaccinated to be allowed access to their place of work.
Speaking at yesterday’s virtual Covid-19 press conference, the PM stated that while some countries have forced vaccinations or have confined the unvaccinated to remaining at home, this is not the case in Trinidad and Tobago.
He said however, with the rising number of deaths and Covid-19 cases daily, along with a reduction in the uptake of the vaccines, it is imperative that the Government consider urgent policy measures to increase the rate of vaccination among the population.
“Ladies and gentlemen, these urgent policy measures, I’ve had extensive discussions with the Attorney General and his support team in his Ministry, and his advisors outside, and we will now move to a situation of insisting that people in Trinidad and Tobago acknowledge the Government’s policy, this nation’s policy that vaccination is our best way of dealing with this carrier of death and destruction. But we’ll try to make it as palatable as possible.
“So, the following effects will come into place.
“We will attempt to encourage and increase the level of vaccination. The Government being the largest employer of labour, so the Government’s workplace is going to change.
“It is the intention of the Government come mid-January to insist that the Government’s workplace will require vaccinated workers. We will put things in place to identify such status.”
He noted that there will be exemptions for medically certified reasons but outside of that the Government’s workplace will require if you’re a Government employee that you show your vaccination status, failing which you will not be encouraged in the workplace.
He said for those who choose not to be vaccinated and therefore cannot come to the workplace, they will still have a job at the establishment but their choice of not coming to work under the conditions laid down will result in them not being paid.
According to the PM, the new policy will apply to all Government and State Enterprises staff.
Sharing some stats on the vaccination status of Government employees, Rowley said that just 50 per cent of the staff at the Tobago Regional Health Authority was vaccinated, while at the North Central and North West Regional Health Authorities, it was 48 and 45 per cent respectively.
The numbers under National Security were even lower with 49 per cent vaccination in the Police Service and 35 and 30 per cent respectively in the Prison Service and the Defence Force. Mean-while, Immigration was at 25 per cent and Fire Services, 20 per cent.
“These are Government employees who for some reasons decided that they are not going to take part in the national programme to protect the national population from what in effect is a killing virus.”
Noting that there was a high level of vaccination in State Enterprises and Private Sector divisions, Rowley said: “So it is possible in some sectors in this requirement to get vaccinated and use vaccination as the protection against this intruder, but only some sectors have been able to accomplish it or have made any effort to accomplish it, and the biggest delinquent is the Government. And that is why the Government is now having to act.
“I know there will be a lot of response to this but let all those responses be grounded in the foundational argument that there is a pandemic taking place in the world. People are dying by the millions, people are dying by the tens per day, our average here is about one per hour in Trinidad and Tobago, and if we don’t intervene, the outcome is one of delinquency. A Government cannot accept delinquency in a pandemic. And nobody ever said that it was going to be easy, nobody ever said it was going to be painless. What we’ve always said is that we will do what is required to be done to bring all of us out of this as best we could,” Rowley said.
