Critically ill

It might be the biggest open secret in the health sector, which several medical professionals reluctantly admitted last week, but Jamaica’s COVID-19 vaccination programme appears to be critically ill – if not dead – with only about 27 per cent of the population inoculated.

Up to yesterday, the Ministry of Health & Wellness had more than 50 permanent vaccination sites across Jamaica listed on its website; 17 of which were located in Kingston, St Andrew, and St Catherine.

A Sunday Gleaner probe revealed, however, that at least 10 of those 17 locations have either been shuttered or have drastically reduced their vaccination offerings.

The reasons vary: from the reopening of full-time, face-to-face classes and a lack of medical professionals to administer the jabs; to a chronic falloff of people turning out, as COVID-19 fears, deaths, and hospital admissions diminish.

As it stands now, most people are only taking the vaccination to meet employment or travel requirements, health officials at the locations explained to the Sunday Gleaner team during visits last week.

Some persons, they said, have even offered them money to falsify COVID-19 vaccination information without administering the jab. Still others rushed the vaccination programme during earlier days to capitalise on incentive grants that were being offered by the Government.

The latest figures released by the health ministry showed that up to this month, Jamaica recorded some 152,000 overall COVID-19 cases, and approximately 3,500 deaths related to the disease.

Up to last week, the health ministry could not provide The Sunday Gleaner with the overall budget expended so far on Jamaica’s COVID-19 vaccination programme.

However, in February last year, the health ministry had announced that over $5 billion had been allocated to procure COVID-19 vaccines, with an additional $978 million to be spent on other resources to roll out the national vaccination programme. The expectation was that two million Jamaicans would have been vaccinated by March 2022.

But to date, that expectation is far off the mark, with only 27.3 per cent of the country’s 2.9 million population fully vaccinated, the ministry revealed last week.

This low take-up has also led to the dumping of expired vaccines – 603,210 doses so far – with no plans currently on the table to purchase any more.

LOW NUMBERS

The South East Regional Health Authority earlier this month announced that one of the main sites, St Joseph’s Hospital in Kingston, would discontinue administering COVID-19 vaccination on January 1 next year. And they are not alone.

According to workers at the Stony Hill HEART Academy, one of the permanent vaccination sites listed on the health ministry’s website, the location has been closed for about two months as authorities needed the space for classrooms.

Operations were reportedly relocated to the nearby Stony Hill Health Centre. However, unlike at the academy where the hours were from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday to Friday, vaccinations at the clinic were limited to a few hours each Tuesday. On a good day, no more than 15 people show up, the majority of them returning for booster shots, the news team was informed.

“The sensationalisation and the newness have ended. It (COVID) is just a part of Jamaica right now,” offered a staff member. “People still wear their masks, but they don’t have that fright any more. People come for vaccines mostly because of work purposes or if they are going overseas.”

Last year, Professor Denise Eldemire-Shearer, a medical doctor and the island’s resident ageing expert, lobbied for the Mona Ageing & Wellness Centre at The University of the West Indies (UWI) to be used as a vaccination centre.

Doing so, she proposed, would combat a shortage of information and fear among the elderly, and provide them with easy access by way of wheelchair ramps and seating.

Last week, however – much like one site at the University Hospital, which now only offers service a few hours each Friday – operations had been drastically scaled back.

“There were times during the original period when we were doing 300/400 vaccinations a day. But we are only doing 20 a day now, so the scale-back was because of numbers,” explained Eldemire-Shearer. “It doesn’t make sense to stay open for eight hours for 20 people. Let’s be realistic.”

The site at the Waterford Health Centre in Portmore, St Catherine, has also been shut down from June, and traffic redirected to the Greater Portmore Health Centre. There, vaccinations have been limited to Mondays and Wednesdays from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m, contrary to the ministry’s three-day listing.

The vaccination site at the Old Harbour Civic Centre has also closed, and a sign directed people to the Old Harbour Health Centre twice a month. At the centre, however, staff said that had been further scaled down to a few hours on Tuesdays.

The Cumberland Road Health Centre in Spanish Town has also stopped offering the jabs, with persons being directed instead to the St Jago Park Health Centre. There, staff members encouraged this reporter to take a shot, “as we still don’t know what this COVID-19 thing is going to bring”.

‘NO DEMAND IN MANY AREAS’

Presented with the findings by this newspaper, last week the Ministry of Health declined to respond to questions regarding the number of active vaccination sites islandwide, as well as the number of persons turning up. However, portfolio minister Dr Christopher Tufton admitted that the programme is waning.

“It is true that the operations have scaled down largely because of a significant falloff in demand, almost to the point of no demand at all in many areas,” Tufton told The Sunday Gleaner yesterday.

“I think there is a general sense that the COVID-19 virus is no longer a threat, and when combined with the general mood from the days of it being a threat against taking the vaccines, then there is significant lack of interest.”

Promising to look into the seemingly outdated information on the ministry’s website, Tufton added, “It is understandable why you would have that significant falloff in demand. The position of the health ministry is to make the vaccine available, on demand, and to encourage Jamaicans who have not been vaccinated to do so.”

The minister also noted that COVID-19 wards at some hospitals, such as Savanna-la-Mar, have been retrofitted and repurposed. So, too, have the health emphases, he said, which have switched from COVID-19 to chronic illnesses, including those springing from the virus, such as mental health issues.

NATURAL IMMUNITY

Dr Alfred Dawes, CEO of the Windsor Wellness Centre, is not so worried about Jamaica’s flagging vaccination programme.

Once a champion for the COVID-19 vaccine, Dawes discontinued the offering at his private practice in St Andrew earlier this year, noting that given the spread throughout the population, most Jamaicans would have already built up immunity against the virus.

“I believe that the Omicron variant was a natural vaccine that allowed us to get a broad level of immunity against prior strains and to some extent future Omicron strains, where the antibodies would allow you to have less severe illnesses,” Dawes told The Sunday Gleaner.

“We were in an evolution of the virus into one that was much more contagious but less lethal, less debilitating, because the virus now wants to survive and to survive it has to keep its host healthy and to affect as many hosts as possible,” he explained.

“So I believe that the need for the vaccine has now become more for persons who are elderly with serious comorbidities, which is a small subset of the population.”

WASTE OF MONEY

“The Government needs to stop wasting taxpayers’ money! If we are spending one taxpayer dollar on COVID vaccines, I think that is government incompetence,” charged Dr Roger Hunter, a consultant neurosurgeon and medical strategist.

Hunter has always criticised the Government’s vaccination policies, and bashed members of the Opposition for being equally inept in promoting the vaccines.

“When I look around and see the people with hypertension, diabetes, stroke; those with brain tumours, cancer needing treatment, and to hear the ministry spending on COVID-19 vaccines?” he asked rhetorically.

“And we are still not talking about people who have developed complications from the vaccines. I have been trying to tell the people of Jamaica: ‘COVID is not new!’” charged Hunter, who has endured heavy criticism for his anti-vaccination stance.

Hunter cited one high school student he knows of who lost more than 100 days of schooling after taking the COVID-19 vaccine.

Jamaica confirmed its first case of COVID-19 in March 2020. On March 8, 2021, the country received its first batch of 50,000 vaccines from the Government of India. Jamaica also became the first country in the Caribbean to receive COVID-19 vaccines through the COVAX facility.

corey.robinson@gleanerjm.com

COVID-19 VACCINATION ADMINISTERED UP TO OCTOBER 2022

• Total doses – 1,495,422

• First dose – 715,138

• Second dose – 614,568

• Single dose – 120,792

• Immunocompromised

dose – 4,441

• Booster shots – 40,483