Govt seeks $37 million to fund ‘new COVID battle’

Government is again injecting millions of taxpayers’ dollars into a”new battle” against the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19, Minister of Health Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Bostic declared Tuesday.

The money is to pay for thousands of vaccines, personal protective equipment (PPE) and the massive number of testing apparatus needed to embark upon Government’s house-to-house testing initiative, Operation Seek and Save.

In making the case to Parliament to approve $37,710,321 in supplementary financing,  Lt Col Bostic explained that in many cases, global supply chains for COVID-19 have not been working in favour of Barbados’ public health officials.

As a result, he said Government is intent on shoring up its supplies for current and future outbreaks.

The health minister told the House: “We have been adjusting to situations as they arise because it is a dynamic situation that is confronting us and not a one-size-fits-all.

“We have been adjusting from protocols to everything else and naturally, we must have all of the PPE and all of the resources that are required to fulfil our mandate.

“We are seeing from time to time that the global supply chain and transportation trains sometimes do not work in our favour and the lab for example, which has been going through a trying time, has been having to do manual extractions because we do not have the supplies for the automated extraction that we would have put in for months ago last year.”

Among the agencies expected to benefit from the funding are the Best Dos Santos Public Health Laboratories, the country’s main isolation centres, the Sir Winston Scott Polyclinic that houses the country’s immunization programme and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH), which is said to be under tremendous pressure.

“Further than that, the QEH is responsible for the isolation facilities in the country, the management and the operation of those facilities and those facilities have come under pressure especially with the surge that we are facing and also the fact that there have been seeing more sick people now than at any time during the pandemic,” Bostic contended.

Government has promised vaccinations for 20 per cent of the country under the World Health Organization’s Covax facility, said Lt Col Bostic, who promised officials will not be merely “sitting and waiting” to receive them.

He explained: “Those vaccines will come, but obviously those vaccines were inadequate for us to do what we want, which is to provide vaccines for the entire country. And so, the government has been having bilateral [talks] and meetings with all kinds of other sources to be able to obtain vaccines outside of the Covax facility, so that we can purchase in larger numbers. And so we have added some funding to be able to do that and to roll out that deployment plan when the vaccines become available.”

Also covered under the funds is sanitizing equipment for the Barbados Drug Service as well as an urgent care delivery pharmaceutical service to deliver medicine to citizens.

In an attempt to “carry the battle into the communities” through the Seek and Save programme, Lt Col Bostic also promised to revive outpatient clinics in St Joseph and St. Andrew to facilitate community testing in the rural parishes.

(KS)