Ministry aiming to ramp up HPV vax drive after COVID disruption
Published:Saturday | December 11, 2021 | 12:08 AMJudana Murphy/Gleaner Writer
Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dr Jacquiline Bisasor-McKenzie says that the island’s efforts to boost vaccination against the human papillomavirus (HPV) have been significantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Government has been offering the vaccine to grade-seven girls since 2017 to prevent cervical cancer under a school-based immunisation programme.
Two doses are required, the second of which should be administered between six and 12 months after the first dose.
“Because of the kids being out of school, this has impacted quite a bit on the delivery of the HPV vaccine. I can say that we have fallen off quite a bit. What we are looking at now in terms of catching up is an expansion of the delivery schedule,” she told a Gleaner Editors’ Forum on Wednesday.
The CMO explained that the ministry will also be moving to have older persons accessing the vaccine with a different dosing regimen, adding that the public would be further advised.
Meanwhile, in early October, at least three health regions across Jamaica reported that some vaccines for young children, including the BCG, which offer protection against tuberculosis; MMR, which boost immunisation against measles, mumps and rubella; and oral polio vaccines (OPV) were in short supply, but Bisasor-McKenzie said that the health ministry has since boosted its supplies.
“We are back on target to try to get anybody that would’ve missed their dose. We would’ve put other things in place in terms of utilising the IPV (inactivated polio vaccine) instead of the OPV in a schedule that is approved to get children vaccinated,” she explained.
At the time, no reason was given for the shortage.
“We had an issue where we had a set of vaccines that arrived, but on inspection, there was an issue with the cold chain and so we had to discard some of those vaccines and then it was a matter of getting the replacement quick enough,” Bisasor-McKenzie said on Wednesday.
The CMO said there may have been other issues that contributed to the shortage that she could not immediately recall.
She also sought to reassure Jamaicans that infant vaccines are ordered way ahead of time.
“We always keep a buffer so that we don’t run out. So when you see we’ve run out, or we’ve run dangerously low, usually something has happened with the supply chain that would’ve caused that, but we make every effort to ensure that we have the vaccines here,” Bisasor-McKenzie explained.