Majority of healthcare workers vaccinated – Health Minister

…hospitals activate contingency plan to prevent disruptions
– no reports of persons dying after taking vaccine
With Government’s stance that unvaccinated health workers will be denied entry to service the population during this deadly wave of COVID-19, Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony has informed that a majority of persons in the sector have been vaccinated.

Speaking with the media on Thursday, he explained that this leaves the unvaccinated health workers in the minority. Currently, hospitals are activating mechanisms to ensure that this lack of human resource capacity does not cause any disruptions to providing health care to the public.
“I think right now, a substantial portion of the health workforce have actually gotten their vaccine. There’s some who still did not get their vaccine, and they’re in the minority. So, what the hospitals have done is to make arrangements so that the shifts are covered. We’ll see what happens after,” Dr Anthony explained.
According to the Minister, with the Delta and other variants proving to be even deadlier – there is a concern if health workers remain unvaccinated and remain on the frontlines.
“When this all started, we called healthcare workers frontline workers. They were the barrier between us and this virus. One of the best ways of protecting our healthcare workers is to make sure that they’re vaccinated.”
He pointed to the United States, which has mandated vaccination for all federal workers, highlighting that, “That’s because they’re now confronted with an upsurge of Delta infections. They have so much more resources than we have and their hospitals are overflowing. They’re having problems with enough oxygen for their patients. They’re having problems in terms of trying to get beds for people. It is a serious thing and if our frontline workers are going to be unvaccinated, they can be among the first set of people who can be infected.”
While addressing the contention that a person’s human rights must not be tampered with, the Minister cautioned that sometimes individual rights have to ‘yield to the collective’ in order to keep an entire population safe.
Earlier on Thursday, several unvaccinated healthcare workers were denied entry to the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC), but the institution said its patients did not suffer as a result of the stance.
GPHC’s Communications Manager Chelauna Providence told Guyana Times that approximately 50 employees were denied entry in keeping with the COVID-19 measures issued by the Health Ministry.
In updated COVID-19 measures which took effect on August 1, the Guyana Government mandated that healthcare workers be vaccinated against the life-threatening virus. Failure to do so would mean that they would be required to submit regular PCR tests to prove that they were not infected with the disease.
At the time, several of these persons had taken to the streets to protest against the measures, causing Government to announce on August 11, a two-week timeframe within which they were urged to reconsider their stance and get vaccinated.
This period expired today and many workers who still refused to get vaccinated turned up to work where they were denied entry since they did not produce a negative COVID-19 test.
“Staff were not locked out of the compound. The staff were given very clear instructions, not just yesterday, but two weeks ago and before that, that they need to be vaccinated if they’re working at the GPHC, which is subdivision agency of the Ministry of Health. They were given the option to either be vaccinated or producing a medical PCR test for entrance to the compound and this discussion, like I said, not just started two weeks ago,” Providence explained.
“They were given two weeks to comply with the vaccination or producing a negative PCR. We did send out a memo to our staff yesterday considering that the two weeks have come to an end, letting them know that if they could not produce their negative PCR or their vaccination cards, they will not be allowed into the compound. So, the staff were not locked out, the staff did not comply with the requirements for entry to the compound,” she added.
Asked specifically how many employees of the GPHC have opted to remain unvaccinated against the novel coronavirus, the Communications Manager said this information was not readily available. However, she said there were about50 persons who were denied entry.
In fact, she said persons whom she knows to be vaccinated were also denied entry because they did not produce their COVID vaccine card. Regarding the impact this situation has had on the delivery of healthcare services, Providence explained that the GPHC’s patients did not suffer.
“We did meet and discuss what contingency plans we will put in place considering the worst-case scenario. Fortunately, today (Thursday) we did not need to deploy any worst-case scenario plans, because we did have staff who were willing to adhere to the requirements and either got their vaccination or produce negative PCRs…,” Providence further noted.
On the other hand, one healthcare worker at the protest stated that she was aware that one person who took the vaccine had died, but according to Dr Anthony, this is a tactic being used to defend their hesitancy. “No one has died after taking the vaccines,” he reiterated.