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Vaccine sprint

After marking half-million jabs, Tufton targets 800,000 by September

Published:Friday | August 27, 2021 | 12:10 AM
Nurse Jodian Walford (right) administers a dose of COVID-19 vaccine to J. Wray & Nephew employee Michille Buchanan at the company’s Spanish Town Road headquarters as part of a Private Sector Vaccination Initiative inoculation drive on Wednesday. In the b
Rudolph Brown/Photographer
Nurse Jodian Walford (right) administers a dose of COVID-19 vaccine to J. Wray & Nephew employee Michille Buchanan at the company’s Spanish Town Road headquarters as part of a Private Sector Vaccination Initiative inoculation drive on Wednesday. In the background are (from left) Jacqueline Cuthbert, senior director of human resources at JWN; Jean-Philippe Beyer, managing director, JWN; and Juliet Cuthbert-Flynn, state minister in the Ministry of Health and Wellness.

Jamaica crossed the psychological hurdle of administering half a million doses of COVID-19 vaccines on Thursday, an important step in the journey towards the 65 per cent herd immunity of its population by March 2022.

The development came 48 hours after the country scored another victory in delivering a record one-day total of 21,000 shots.

At 4 p.m. Thursday, the island had registered 500,605 overall vaccinations, the health ministry said in a press statement.

Of that number, 359,675 were first doses and 139,242 were second jabs. The remainder were one-shot Johnson & Johnson doses.

The Andrew Holness administration has faced noisy opprobrium about its slow procurement of vaccines from global drugmakers, which has left the country in the lurch with the worst per-capita take-up in the English-speaking Caribbean.

According to the ministry’s online tracker, just over 140,000 persons have been fully vaccinated, which represents five per cent of the population.

But the prime minister and Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton have fended off critics, chastising wealthy countries for stockpiling vaccines well beyond their capacity for usage, thus depriving less-developed nations for months.

A shipment of 200,000 doses of Oxford-AstraZeneca gifted by the Canadian government arrived here on Thursday, stark validation of the Government’s projection that the supply chain would increase sharply in August.

“In the last four weeks alone, we received more than 820,000 of those doses. This is in keeping with the inflows we had predicted, with more to come,” Tufton said in the statement.

In an interview with The Gleaner, Tufton said the ministry believes that the end-of-September target of 700,000-800,000 vaccinations would be within reach.

Since COVID-19 vaccinations began in March, the island has received 1,139,140 doses of vaccines, including from the African Medical Supply Platform, the COVAX Facility, Canada, India, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The country is using the AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer brands.

Vaccine hesitancy has stalked Jamaica’s inoculation campaign, with anti-vaxxers vigorously pushing inflammatory rhetoric and conspiracy theories.

But a wave of record deaths and hospitalisations, likely fuelled by the highly contagious Delta variant, triggered crowded vaccination sites over a four-day blitz that ended on Tuesday.

As at Wednesday, Jamaica recorded 64,294 infections and 1,453 deaths.

editorial@gleanerjm.com