Select a region
The only way out of the pandemic is via the vaccine – so why isn’t Jersey scaling up its operations at the Fort and allowing GPs to get involved to roll it out even faster?
That’s the question posed by reader John Henwood in this letter…
The present outbreak in Guernsey demonstrates convincingly that an elimination strategy does not work.
The island has been as tight as a drum since last Spring with very strict controls over people coming into Guernsey, yet when they began testing they found cases which could not readily be traced back to an incomer or an existing case.
Coronavirus cannot be eliminated, it is universal and with us for the foreseeable future.
The best solution from where we are now is to roll out a vaccination programme as quickly as possible and so deny the virus viable human hosts. In Jersey, the roll-out is much too slow. A single point of delivery at Fort Regent is a bottleneck and operating it for only eight hours a day is not good enough.
Pictured: "The best solution from where we are now is to roll out a vaccination programme as quickly as possible."
We were told even before the AstraZeneca vaccine was approved that Jersey had plentiful supplies of Pfizer vaccine assured and there was a standing order for 50,000 AstraZeneca shots. So vaccine supply doesn't seem to be a problem.
The Fort Regent centre should be operating 12 hours a day at least and it should have more that its present four administration stations.
In addition, GPs should be allowed to administer the vaccine to their patients as they do the influenza and pneumonia jabs. They know their patients' needs better than anyone, but it seems the Health Department's one-size-fits-all has to prevail.
Pictured: "The Fort Regent centre should be operating 12 hours a day at least."
Government has got it wrong - the quicker the vaccination programme is extended and the roll out accelerated, the sooner life will return to something like normal and we can learn to live with corona virus, not fear dying with it.
John Henwood
