Vaccination Drive

The flu season starts in October and ends in May the following year.

Deyalsingh, speaking during the launch of the ministry’s 2016 Flu Vaccination Drive held yesterday at the Aranjuez Health Centre, said when he first took up office last October, there was no comprehensive plan that would roll over from year to year regardless of the Minister of Health.

“We have pulled down a template so that any Minister of Health, in any administration, could look at this template and put it into action because we have done the homework.

We are ramping up our annual vaccination rates from from 6,000 doses to 100,000 doses. We ordered those doses from PAHO (Pan American Health Organisation) from as early as April of this year. The 100,000 doses are here, and they will be distributed to the different health centres,” he said.

Tuesdays and Thursdays have been designated vaccination days, and anyone in any high risk group could go in to the centres between 8am and 4pm and get their free vaccination.

The high risk groups included health care workers regardless of age because they were exposed on a daily basis, so their immune system may not be robust enough to withstand a daily bombardment of people with the flu as opposed to other people, he said.

The second high risk group was pregnant women.

“Each year there are about 17,000 live births in Trinidad and Tobago.

I urge all pregnant women to make use of this free service. They would be able to access the vaccination on any given day at their ante-natal clinic regardless of the day. Last year two out of eight deaths due to the flu were pregnant women,” Deyalsingh said.

The vaccine would also be given to the elderly who were 65 and over.

Every year during the flu season globally, the group that contributed the most to deaths due to flu was the elderly because their immune system tended to be compromised.

The minister noted that among the elderly, if they happened to suffer from diabetes, hypertension or obesity, they were at a higher risk.

Children between six months and two years would also be vaccinated.

“There about 17,000 births each year, so we are targeting about 40,000 children,” he said.

Those who did not fall within these high risk groups would be turned away, but could get the vaccine at their private doctors.

Deyalsingh said there were “sentinel” doctors who received a certain number of the vaccines for a small fee. However, he said there were those doctors who bought the vaccines from commercial companies, but the ministry had no control of their prices.