ON WEDNESDAY, Chief Medical Officer Dr Roshan Parasram explained that TT would wait for more rigorous scientific testing of the new bivalent covid19 vaccines before considering their use locally.

In August, the US Food and Drug Administration extended its emergency authorisation to new formulations of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. These boosters stimulate the creation of antibodies for both the original strain and the now more commonplace BA.4 and BA.5 variants of the coronavirus, which are now the prevalent versions in circulation.

Hopefully this country will seek to acquire the bivalent vaccines once satisfied as to their safety; we have already lost over 4,000 lives to the virus, and every effort should be made to avoid more unnecessary deaths.

Unfortunately, since so many people were persuaded by conspiracy theorists and fearmongers that the vaccines themselves would prove fatal, our uptake rate of the original vaccines was unimpressive.

Nevertheless, largely thanks to those who did take the vaccines, and the precautions imposed even on those who did not, new cases have fallen precipitously, along with mercifully fewer deaths.

Patients in dedicated covid19 facilities have dropped to 55. The decline in new cases since August is significant, dropping from a seven-day average of 287 to this month's seven-day average of 27.

Hence the country has been able to relax its protocols on covid19 transmission, notably expressed in Tobago's vigorously unmasked Carnival this week.

But Dr Parasram made his covid19 vaccine announcement while launching the flu vaccination campaign for 2022-2023, which brings its own menu of viruses into circulation.

Distribution of 75,000 doses of the influenza vaccine begins today at 50 health centres throughout the country. The vaccines are trivalent, targeting two strains of influenza A (H1N1 and H3N3), and one strain of influenza B.

The Health Ministry is encouraging high-risk groups to take the vaccine early. Those groups include pregnant women, the elderly over 65, children six months and older, healthcare workers, and anyone with non-communicable diseases.

Strict covid19 protocols limited the spread of influenza and other non-covid19 communicable viruses in 2020 and 2021.

But as social interaction increases and public gatherings resume, anyone with a compromised immune system or respiratory challenges would be well-advised to take the flu vaccine - and to continue to practise the measures taken against covid19 in public spaces, including masking and sanitising.

It's good to see many people have continued to wear masks in public, and that some businesses continue to insist on customers wearing them and sanitising before entering their premises.

Covid19 may have died down, but as we have already seen, the virus is still mutating. It may have retreated, but it has not disappeared.