One regional top health official is proposing that Barbados and other Caribbean countries implement a digital vaccination card.
Dr Yitades Gebre, PAHO/WHO Representative to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean made the suggestion on Wednesday and also made it clear that he was not in favour of mandatory vaccination or a “vaccination passport” for individuals to enter a country.
“From a PAHO and WHO perspective we don’t endorse mandatory vaccination except in certain conditions where there is an important provision for protecting the health and wellbeing of healthcare workers and essential workers, and also the people who will be receiving services from such individuals. Therefore for certain outcomes such a mandate could be given in keeping with the local regulations,” he said.
“What WHO and PAHO recommend at this point is to have digitalised vaccination cards. This vaccination card is not only for COVID-19 but for any of the vaccines which we have from childhood vaccination and some of our children do have,” said Gebre.
He was responding to a question during a special PAHO webinar to discuss the topic Variant of Concern, Delta to Omicron, Transmissibility, Severity, Impact of Social Mobility: What Will Drive Future Trends and Optimizing our Response.
Dr Gebre said: “There are only few international required vaccines at this time like yellow fever. So those kinds of vaccination records could be digitalized and we could have those digitalized records to be presented when we travel.
“Otherwise, having a mandatory passport to move from one country to another one is against international health regulations . . . We are not recommending to have restrictions if individuals do not have a passport of vaccination not to be allowed to enter a country or leave a country, except for yellow fever where we have an international regulation at this point,” he added.
So far, the European Union (EU) has implemented a digital COVID certificate system, which is issued in all member states to help facilitate free movement. This consists of a vaccination certificate, a test certificate and a certificate of recovery.
These Digital COVID Certificates, which are not a pre-requisite for travel, contain basic information such as the individual’s name, date of birth, and a unique identifier number and other necessary information to confirm the individual’s vaccination, testing or recovery status.
During the virtual PAHO/WHO event, Dr Yitades also brushed aside the notion that we will soon have to “live with” the coronavirus.
He also called for greater education on the vaccination as he urged individuals to stop referring to people as “anti-vaxxers or conspiracy theorists” because they were refusing to take the COVID-19 jab.
“We need to educate the public including to reduce stigmatization of those individuals or giving them certain names like anti-vaxxers or conspiracy theorists. We have to refrain from that and understand why people are not taking the vaccine and then encourage them to take the vaccine. We have to continue to educate everybody why they [should] take the vaccine,” he said.
“The term let’s live with the virus is absolutely not appropriate because COVID-19 has taken millions of lives and hundreds of millions of people have been affected and some of them, up to 20 per cent of those who got infected, do have a chronic condition, which is known as long COVID.
“Therefore living with the virus does not really translate into ‘normal life’. However, what we can do is that we want to have our lives and livelihood continue and in order to do such we have to have all prevention measures including the acceptance of vaccines and continue the social distancing, ventilation, hand hygiene and all those measures that are important,” he explained.
“The notion of ‘living with the virus’ should not be proponed where it is a normal approach for addressing a dangerous communicable disease like SARS-COV2. Still, we do not know much about this virus. We are still learning and the virus is continuing to be transmissible and sometimes very severe,” he said.
Long COVID syndrome or post-COVID-19 condition generally refers to symptoms an individual experiences after recovering from the virus, including cognitive dysfunction or impairment, respiratory challenges or shortness of breath, fatigue and cardiac challenges. (MM)
