AGRICULTURE Minister Clarence Rambharat said farmers, vendors and others in involved in the agriculture sector are coming forward to be vaccinated against covid19.
He made this comment to Newsday at an event hosted by the Feed the Nation group in Debe on Sunday. Rambharat's statement came one day after the Prime Minister and Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh said August must be a big month for covid19 vaccination in Trinidad and Tobago.
"We have our own programme which started this week and to be honest with you, not a lot of farmers registered for the programme. We had vendors,we had the ministry employees." But Rambharat said this did not mean there was vaccine hesitancy amongst farmers and other agriculture stakeholders.
"What we realised was that in all the groups so far, a lot of the farmers would have been captured." He said farmers who were over 65 years and had co-morbidities and other farmers were vaccinated through other groups such as manufacturing
"Some of them are agro-processors." Rambharat said in parts of the country like Manzanilla, the ministry received reports of farmers coming in to be vaccinated.
"We believe it has been successful so far. I have heard no resistance from any of the groups or any of the farmers' groups. Vendors and farmers are important because they interact with the public." He said the ministry made provisions for 10,000 people to be vaccinated and within that group "would be 5,000 fishermen, farmers, vendors and their spouses."
Rambharat said many of these people have been very anxious to get vaccinated. "They themselves have been saying they are in the frontline and they have been interacting (with people)." People involved in agricultural activities are amongst the frontline workers who are allowed under the public health regulations and the state of emergency regulations to continue to work.
Addressing a news conference at the Scarborough Library Facility in Tobago on Saturday, Dr Rowley said, ""Within our population of 1.4 million people..that's the target we are looking at..the science tells us we need to vaccinate 900,000 of those people." Rowley continued,"To date, we have put our hands and have in our possession, approximately 1.2 million doses of (WHO-approved covid19) vaccines."
Against this background, with more vaccines expected to arrive soon and the possibility of the covid19 delta variant coming to TT, Rowley said there is no reason why people who are vaccine hesitant or have not yet been vaccinated should not get vaccinated now.
He agreed with Deyalsingh's calls for politicians, councillors, parliamentarians, religious bodies and other stakeholders to play their part in getting people vaccinated. "I did the same thing with the Cabinet on Thursday. I asked all the people in the Cabinet who represent people, the same way you organise and mobilise to come out in rallies and so on..which we have not had for a long time in this country...go out there and mobilise people."
Deyalsingh said as of July 31, 194,710 people have received two
