‘We all owe a duty to everybody to be responsible’
MORE than 1,000 people aged between 18 and 50 have still not been vaccinated
There are around 23,000 people in this age group.
‘Nearly 1,200 of those have still not come forward for their vaccinations,’ CCA chairman Peter Ferbrache said.
‘I know some of those might not want it for various reasons.
‘Some people are not doing it because they cannot be bothered. We’ve all got to be bothered. We’ve all got to be responsible.’
He also noted that those aged 18 to 30 had disproportionally not been vaccinated yet.
‘We’ve also got some in the 40 to 50 age bracket, who want to go to play golf, go to Herm for the weekend or they’ve got a lunch appointment so they’ve not turned up for their appointments,’ he said.
‘We all owe a duty to everybody to be responsible.
‘We all must play our part.’
He said broadcasting the importance of vaccination was now the main way to make those people come forward.
‘You’re never going to get everybody,’ he said.
‘Some people can’t for health reasons and some people have some very strong beliefs that they don’t want to do it.
‘But a fair chunk of that 1,200 people are just people who haven’t bothered.’
Dr Brink confirmed that Guernsey would be following the latest Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation guidance that children with increased risk of serious Covid-19 disease would be offered the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, as well as young people aged 12 to 17, who live with an immunosuppressed person.
The news also means that those within three months of their 18th birthday can now get jabbed.
‘Now I’m really pleased about that, because we have a group of students that are due to go to university, who turn 18 in July and so we then will be able to get them vaccinated before they go to university,’ Dr Brink said.
Guernsey has also been looking at putting on a booster programme in September and October, in line with the UK
However, there was little hope for those vaccinated outside the Bailiwick yesterday. Dr Brink said there was still no verification process for vaccination certificates from outside the Common Travel Area.
Deputy Ferbrache said overall the island’s vaccination levels were now are very high.
‘They are high enough now that the impact of cases is less, the risk to the community less, and we cannot justify preventing travel in the way that we used to.
‘But we are not lurching to the other extreme and opening the doors and letting Covid run riot.
‘We want to keep the numbers as low and manageable as they can be.’
Just more than 40% of the cases since the end of the second wave have been fully vaccinated.
Dr Brink said this would become more common as vaccinations continued in Guernsey, but the jabs were protecting people from hospitalisation and death from Covid.
‘It’s simply the factor of our increasing number of our adult population that are protected through vaccination,’ she said.
