INFECTIOUS disease specialist Dr Peter Chin Hong says other than not being vaccinated, the biggest threat to people in this phase of covid19 is misinformation, particularly when it comes from leaders of any sort in the community.
“It is a global problem and the WHO (World Health Organization) listed it as one of the top ten threats to world health right now,” he said.
Chin Hong, a Trinidadian who is associate dean for regional campuses at the University of California, San Francisco made the statement after reading about Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar saying hundreds of thousands of TT citizens were given fake vaccines, at a UNC cottage meeting in Chaguanas on September 9.
Persad-Bissessar said the government had mismanaged the pandemic to the extent that 5,000 people had died, calling it state-sanctioned murder. One week later, she advised people to sue employers if they suffered health issues after being “forced” to take covid19 vaccines.
In December 2021, the Prime Minister said all public servants and employees at state agencies would be required to take the covid19 vaccine by January 17, 2022 or be furloughed, barring medical exemptions. The deadline was extended to February 17, 2022 but the public-sector policy was later scrapped as covid19 deaths and cases began to decline.
Persad-Bissessar said, “Many phases of drug certification for covid vaccines were accelerated. A vaccine that may have taken years to come to market through intensive testing and screening was allowed to be pushed through by international regulatory bodies. Many vaccines injected into people’s bodies should have never been brought to market in their current formulation.”
Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh condemned the statement saying that it implied the hard-working doctors and nurses were complicit in a hoax.
He said, “For the record, the covid19 vaccines distributed in TT – Sinopharm, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Johnson and Johnson – were all approved by the World Health Organization prior to their use, and follow our stated policy to only use WHO-approved vaccines. Our healthcare professionals administered 1,554,804 doses, and it is critical to note that of the 4,444 covid19 deaths, 3,960 or 89.1 per cent were unvaccinated persons.”
The ministry’s last covid19 update on May 2, 2023 said 718,969 people were fully vaccinated with 174,836 being administered boosters. There were 4,390 deaths, 335 of whom were fully vaccinated.
[caption id="attachment_1111575" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar -[/caption]
On January 16, in response to a lawsuit filed by social activist Umar Abdullah of the First Wave Movement, the ministry said, according to reports made to
Events Supposedly Attributable to Vaccines and Immunisations (the ministry’s online system to address the reporting of adverse events of covid19 vaccines) up to August 10, 2023 there were no deaths as a result of the vaccine. But there were 50 adverse reports.
Symptoms from the vaccine included body and nerve pain,
