welcome back to primetime news and a special welcome once again to our viewers
on onespotmedia.com up first this evening over 14,000 doses of the covid 19 vaccine procured
under the Covax facility arrived in the island today Health Minister Dr. Christopher Tufton
and representatives of the Pan American Health Organization PAHO were at the Norman Manley
International Airport this afternoon for the arrival our report of washington brown was
also there and now joins us live fashion thank you so much janella well the plane with the 14
400 doses of the covid 19 vaccines arrived at the norman manly international airport in kingston
sometime after 4 pm today now this comes exactly one week after jamaica received 50 000 doses of
the oxford astrazeneca vaccine as a gift from india now the paho who representative to jamaica
says this is the first phase of delivery vaccines are expected to rise successively during 2021.
according to the first round of kovacs allocations jamaica is continued expected to continue
receiving doses through may until it reaches 124 800 doses the amount specified by kovacs
now the health minister dr christopher toughton says it is important to note that
jamaica is the first caribbean country to receive vaccines under the kovacs facility
and i know there's been a lot of talk about whether jamaica is behind the line why is it
that we are so far behind well if we want to put it in terms of first here is a first that i think
we all should be proud of and happy for but more importantly does speak to the important challenges
of vaccines of vaccine availability to solving the global pandemic that we face in the meantime
dr toughton says the residents of informers as well as the people who care for them will be added
to the priority groups to receive the vaccines this week and others will also be on that list
during the course of this week adding to those lists parliamentarians who are 60
and over and so you will see sometime this week palu interns who are 60 and over
the rationale again behind that is that we need our leaders at the level of the communities
to provide leadership without the risk of exposure to the virus and they represent by virtue of
age also a vulnerable group that will eventually graduate into the sixth and over um among the
general population so during the course of this week we will see more groups being added so
that brings us to another question that continues to be asked when will the prime minister and
the health minister take the vaccine dr toughton says they will take the vaccine sometime in april
i do appreciate the rationale behind us taking the vaccines early and that is a demonstration effect
as leaders and as i said earlier there was an issue initially around whether or not
parliamentarians leaders should take the vaccine first in the context of a scarce commodity numbers
are small or we should go for those who are more vulnerable starting with our health care
workers or over 60s and others and you know in some cases it became almost controversial
and i would determine a distraction from what would be a more important issue of focusing
attention around taking up the vaccines that we still have vaccine hesitance as a big issue
so the matter was discussed and we decided that we would wait a bit