The adolescent COVID-19 vaccination programme continued yesterday at the St. Joseph High School on Woolford Avenue and saw another huge turnout.
The Ministries of Health and Education continued their collaboration to administer Pfizer vaccines to children between the ages of 12 and 17. Yesterday’s drive catered for students attending the St. Joseph High, North Georgetown Secondary, Tutorial High School and Richard Ishmael Secondary School.
When Stabroek News visited the site just before they closed off for the day, staff conducting the vaccination drive revealed that there was a good turnout of students, with them surpassing the amount that they expected initially. It was noted that there was a steady flow of persons coming into the school to be inoculated and as a result it was estimated that they had administered hundreds of jabs at that time.
Meanwhile, during Health Minister, Dr. Frank Anthony’s daily COVID-19 update, he stated that the usual mobile teams have been converted to do vaccinations for schoolchildren and as such a schedule has been worked out with the education ministry to go to the various schools.
“We really hope that we can get the cooperation of parents and if the trend continues as we have seen at MovieTowne, I think very soon we will be able to vaccinate our entire school population and these children would be able to return to school in a very safe environment,” Dr. Anthony said.
An estimated 2,000 children were inoculated on Sunday at MovieTowne. A total of 70,000 students are being targeted. The United States government donated 146,250 doses of the Pfizer vaccine for the campaign. Each child will require two shots three weeks apart. The campaign was launched last Thursday.
The adolescent programme is expected to continue across the country with inoculation drives at the Diamond Secondary School and Bladen Hall Secondary School set for today. Other schools will see inoculation campaigns on Wednesday and Thursday.