Public Health Specialist Dr Elizabeth Ferdinand has urged parents to take their children to get their routine vaccines, amid concerns about a dip in vaccine coverage in 2020 and 2021.
Dr Ferdinand, who also serves as Co-coordinator of the National COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign, also encouraged adults who have not yet got the vaccine against the highly contagious virus to do so and to take children between the ages of 12 and 18 years old for theirs as well.
She made the appeals as Barbados celebrates the 20th Vaccination Week in the Americas, during which routine inoculations and COVID-19 vaccines will be available to the public.
“It’s a total vaccine package, and depending on what age you are or what vaccine you need the nurse will advise and give you the proper vaccine,” Dr Ferdinand said during an interview with Barbados TODAY.
As for the effort to get eligible children immunised against COVID-19, she also reported that the bus Minister of Education Kay McConney announced last week would be deployed to secondary schools to provide vaccines to students with parental consent, should make its first visits this week when the term begins.
“Beginning this week and into the next couple of weeks, we are going to try to go to all of the secondary schools and vaccinate the children who have been given permission by their parents or guardians to have the vaccine,” Dr Ferdinand said.
“So, letters and consent forms will be sent by the school with the children to their parents and all we are asking is for the parents to sign the forms and send it back once they want to have their child vaccinated, and we will go to the schools and do it on certain days.”
Remarks delivered on behalf of Minister of Health and Wellness Ian Gooding-Edghill by Deputy Chief Medical Officer Anton Best during a service on Sunday at the Church of the Nazarene, Bank Hall, St Michael to launch Vaccine Week 2022, indicated that in 2018, the coverage of the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP) vaccine in infants was 94 per cent, while 85 percent of the country’s one-year-olds were vaccinated against measles.
However, those numbers declined to 83 per cent and 76 per cent, respectively, in 2021.
He said due to some services at polyclinics being intermittently impacted by COVID-19, there was the unintended consequence of reduced uptake of routine health services, including immunisations.
“The Ministry continues to place a heavy emphasis on disease prevention as part of standard public health practice. And to be effective at our trade, we need to be tactical, responsive and driven by empirical evidence.
“We will, therefore, as part of Vaccination Week and beyond, be addressing the shortfalls I just highlighted. The overall strengthening and reinvigoration of our immunisation programmes must be a cornerstone of our post-pandemic recovery process,” he said.
According to UNICEF, the complete vaccination schedule for DTP in Latin America and the Caribbean dropped from 90 per cent in 2015 to 76 per cent in 2020. It said in a press release that this implies that one in four children in the region had not received the full schedule needed to protect them from multiple potentially life-threatening diseases.
UNICEF Regional Director for Latin America and Caribbean, June Gough, said the decline in vaccination rates in the region is alarming and puts millions of children and adolescents at risk of dangerous yet preventable diseases.
She said the solution to the issues lies in the strengthening of immunisation programmes and overall health systems.
UNICEF therefore called on governments in Latin America and the Caribbean to urgently strengthen or re-establish routine immunisation programmes and develop campaigns to increase vaccine confidence and implement plans to reach all children and adolescents and their families with vaccination services, especially the most vulnerable who do not have access to health services.
(AH)
