Stricter protocols for the COVID-19 vaccination campaign are expected to be in place so as to prevent persons from “jumping the queue”.
Health Minister Dr. Frank Anthony made the announcement yesterday during his daily COVID-19 update where he stated that one of the challenges that health authorities have faced since the initial rollout vaccines was persons wanting to “jump the line” instead of waiting for their turn.
To prevent this he noted that they will now be requiring stricter documentation for persons to be vaccinated. “When we started with the first 3,000 doses… there were people who wanted to jump the line so they did not want to wait their turn and they would turn up at our vaccination sites and probably try to impersonate the health care workers and with this 50,000 persons that we will be immunising, we will require stricter documentation,” he said.
Another 50,000 persons are expected to be vaccinated in the coming weeks as Guyana has received some 100,000 doses of vaccines recently—20,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine from the Government of China along with 80,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from the Government of India.
Anthony noted that with this tranche, the ministry is hopeful of continuing the vaccination of health care workers from both the public and private sectors. Further, he stated that they will be asking persons to take along their identification cards so that they can verify who they are and take the necessary information.
“If there are persons who are jumping the queue and we discover them then they are going to face stiff penalties because we don’t want people to jump the queue,” he noted.
The minister further added that the health authorities want to give priority to the persons who need the vaccines the most and are the most at risk.
Eventually, he noted, authorities will get vaccines to cover the entire population but right now they are focused on using the limited amount of vaccines to cover the priority groups.
“With this current amount that we have of 100,000 doses, which would cover 50,000 people, we are going to spread it across all regions of Guyana and our priority group as of now are going to be healthcare workers and of course the elderly persons 60 years and above,” the minister noted.
The Minister is yet to provide the results of an investigation into the claim of a businessman that he was vaccinated. The businessman would not have been eligible at that point.
