COVID task force bats for vaccination or testing regime for health workers

The National COVID-19 Vaccination Operationalisation Task Force is proposing that a vaccination or testing programme for nurses and other health care workers be implemented to safeguard lives.

 Front line workers, excluding the Jamaica Defence Force, continue to have a very low penetration rate of members vaccinated against the coronavirus (COVID-19).

Task force chairman Professor Gordon Shirley said this is a major problem, highlighting that fewer than 50 per cent of public-health nurses have been fully vaccinated. 

Speaking at a virtual press conference this morning, he said the vaccination of health care workers is a matter of priority. 

“We cannot continue to allow them to put their lives on the line and not do the best we can to protect them,” Shirley said.

He added, “We think it's very important to do so. We think we have lost more public health nurses and health care workers than we ought to. These are persons who have put their lives on the line for the country and we respect and honour them for having done so, but it would be great if we are also in a position to protect them, to give them the highest level of protection that's available.” 

Arguing that enough time has passed for persons to take advantage of vaccines, Shirley said it is time for a vaccination or test programme for health care workers to come on stream.

“Supply continues to outstrip demand resulting in sub-optimal utilisation, and there's an observation I want to make about this, which is that if we went back six weeks ago, we felt like the real problem was a supply problem because a groundswell of demand was out there, and we felt if we just got the vaccines everybody would get vaccinated. Now, we have a relatively good level of vaccination and the demand, we recognise, is not materialising,” Shirley said. 

“The persons who were willing to come forward have in fact largely been vaccinated, and now we're into those who are hesitant, and the surveys that have been done indicate that up to 65 to 70 per cent of the population is hesitant,” he said. 

Just over 13 per cent of the Jamaican population is fully vaccinated.

- Ainsworth Morris 

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