The Minister of Health yesterday announced that he was pleased with the COVID-19 adolescent vaccination campaign as over 16,000 have thus far been fully inoculated.
Dr Frank Anthony made these remarks during his COVID-19 update where he noted that over the last month, the authorities have seen quite a number of persons within the 12 to 18 age group getting
vaccinated. He stated that 26,554 children have received a first dose while 16,802 have received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
“We have made substantial progress given that we have only recently started giving vaccines to this age group and that’s based primarily on the emergency use authorization for these vaccines to be used in a lower age group, so we have to keep working,” the health minister was quoted as saying.
He noted that in this age category there are approximately 70,000 persons who would be catered for according to the data that the ministry has been using from the Bureau of Statistics. He added that this number also includes youth who are in this age range that may be out of school. As such, the minister stated that they will be doing another set of vaccination outreaches to target this age group.
“We are going to do another round, going out into the communities, going into the various regions, villages, to make sure that we can get more people who would come out and get these vaccines,” Anthony declared.
The minister mentioned that it is important for persons within this age category to be inoculated as many persons would like to see schools reopened and have the country’s education system returned to some level of normalcy.
He added, “If we have a large unvaccinated children population then it’s going to be problematic and therefore the faster we vaccinate children the better it is going to be for the education system to return to that level of normalcy.”
