Opposition calls for vaccination breach audit

The Opposition is calling for an audit to be initiated into breaches of the Government’s COVID-19 vaccination programme.

Opposition leader Mark Golding says the exercise should be led by the Auditor General's Department to ascertain if satisfactory procedures have been established by the Government and to examine the records as to those who have received the vaccine, in order to indicate the nature and extent of the procedural breaches. 

The Government’s vaccination roll-out was hit by claims of inequity and line-skipping in the administration of the AstraZeneca jab at the National Chest Hospital and St Joseph’s Hospital in St Andrew on Friday.

READ: Inequity dogs roll-out as friends, relatives jump priority groups at sites

In fact, Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton admitted to The Sunday Gleaner that “glitches” in the process resulted in persons being called and turning up with family members.

And Errol Greene, the most senior public health administrator in western Jamaica, has confirmed that some persons were vaccinated although they were not scheduled to, but he was unable to say how those persons were selected.

The Opposition is charging that well-thinking Jamaicans are offended by the reported breaches of the vaccination protocols.

These breaches, it argues, violate the principles of efficiency, equity and transparency on which the government had promised that the vaccination programme would be based.

The Opposition is repeating its call for the Government to take a collaborative approach to tackling the COVID-19 pandemic and the implementation of the National COVID-19 Vaccine Development Plan.

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