Health
2,500 COVID vaccine doses arrive Monday in TCI says Governor Dakin
By Dana Malcolm
Staff Writer
#TurksandCaicos, November 22, 2022 – Turks and Caicos’ Covid-19 vaccine cabinet is now officially restocked, and it includes the omicron resistant and children’s doses flown to the islands from the UK.
The bivalent shots which fight both the original variant of Covid-19 and the Omicron variant including the BA.4 and BA.5 variants landed in Providenciales on a British Airways flight on Monday, according to Nigel Dakin, Governor of the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Included along with the 1,000 Moderna bivalent vaccines are 1,170 Pfizer original vaccines which are now only authorized to be used as first doses, and 300 Pfizer pediatric vaccines.
The shipment was procured and paid for by the UK Health Security Agency, the Foreign Commonwealth and
During the update, Dakin reflected on the value of vaccine shipments to the TCI in early 2021; British overseas territories were the first in the region to get the vaccine.
The governor said given the miniscule amount of beds available countrywide; only 30, serving 50,000 residents and over 500,000 stopover visitors a year.
“We take both resident and visitor health very seriously and not many nation states have to work through these types of lopsided proportions between residents and visitors and then link that to limited hospital facilities. The vaccines seriously reduced our risks of hospitalization and therefore allowed us to be far more confident in welcoming the world,” he said.
Tourism in the Turks and Caicos even with the vaccine mandate, some may argue because of it, surged to record levels in 2021 and the trend is expected to hold steady.
While the Turks and Caicos is one of the most vaccinated populations, enthusiasm for boosters remains decidedly low.
At the last update from the Health Ministry in summer, only around 7,000 or 23 percent of the vaccinated population was boosted and in terms of those who were double vaxxed, the numbers were even lower, only 2,939 or around nine percent of the population.
Governor Dakin was among the first in TCI to put confidence in the vaccine, despite widespread skepticism and announced that again, he and Mandy were all set to take the jab; their fifth shot with no complications reported by the couple.