And after announcing those promising numbers, Mahler, like all other ministers at the head table, encouraged Belizeans to get vaccinated so that the country can rebound from the impact of the pandemic. And with that, the Ministry of Health launched their new vaccination campaign - which was the focus of today's event. This campaign is targeted at younger persons, since phase 5 - which includes everyone 18 and older - opened today. It includes a commercial during which fully vaxxed persons are attending a party, a brand new song from TR Shine, and bumper stickers and billboards.
But there are also new measures being taken to bring the vaccine to you and incentives to encourage you to get the jab. Dr Deysi Mendez, the CEO at MOH, explained more.
Dr. Deysi Mendez, CEO, Ministry of Health and Wellness
"Through health education we are not only focusing on the vaccine itself, but also promoting the use of mask, the use of sanitizers, the proper hand washing and the disposal of the same, which is very important, expanding and creating access to testing. It's no longer you coming to the hospital. It's us coming to you in the communities. You can no longer have the excuse to say I live in a community that's very far. We are going to be there once you have the symptoms, once you've been in contact with somebody who has been diagnosed positive, access to testing, PCR testing and rapid testing and by doing all these actions we are confident that with your participation we will come to 70% coverage."
"Specific activities that you will be doing, other than the health education and awareness is the distribution of masks and the distribution of sanitizers that will be happening countrywide only in the urban setting, but also in the communities and rural setting."
"Secondly, testing. We are bringing through the assistance of the mobile teams that will be moving in all the rural areas and urban areas to promote testing, to educate the process. It's about not creating a fear to be tested. We will bring it to you. The communications teams along with the vaccination mobile team will be coming to your area to vaccinate and the best part of it is that persons who get vaccinated in the month of July get a chance to win a prize. How else that can get better."
"The exciting part with the vaccines is that with the partnership and sponsorship of BTB you get to have the opportunity of a vacation. Who doesn't want that. And with the sponsorship and support of BTL we also have another opportunity of a raffle and fortunate enough too, BTL is not conducting a raffle only in urban settings, we are taking this on the rural setting also, so wherever the mobile clinic is there is also the opportunity for these persons living in the communities to get a chance to win."
But why is this campaign just being launch months after vaccines were made available to the public? And why wasn't more being done in the onset to encourage persons to get vaccinated - especially since there were fears from personnel inside the ministry of vaccines expiring? Well, we asked Minister Chebat and he explained that they didn't ramp up the campaign because they felt that they wouldn't have had enough vaccines to meet the demand.
Reporter
"Why launched this campaign 3 months after the vaccinations were available back in March that we started. Obviously the first campaign must have failed because if it wasn't broken you wouldn't fixed it?"
Hon. Michel Chebat, Minister of Health & Wellness
"I guess you are from Channel 7. But as I had explained when we started, we got in a thousand vaccines in March, which was followed by 25,000 and then 36,000 and so we had to ensure that the initial shipment of vaccines was dedicated to our frontline workers or healthcare workers and to the most vulnerable in our society. Couple weeks ago, through the courtesy on the Government and people of Mexico we were able to get 100,000 vaccines and so with that gift we are now able to open up to the entire country and we felt it was now appropriate to launched that by having this media campaign."
Reporter
"Some of these stuff that are being offered, the billboards, bumper stickers going to different communities, why wasn't the ministry been able to do this from the get-go, because even though we wanted to stick to the phases we know that people outside the phases were still getting vaccinated and everybody wanted the numbers to go up. So, having done this earlier would have made those numbers go up faster."
Hon. Michel Chebat, Minister of Health & Wellness
"The numbers could not go up faster because we did not have sufficient vaccines for everybody and so again, as I repeated, we got the vaccines in stages and how we got them, we got them into arms and again, we had to reserve them initially for our healthcare workers who at the frontline, our police and then to the most vulnerable of our society. But thankfully God is great and we have good neighbors, we have good friends who have helped us not only with vaccines but with also the cold storage with the syringe to be able to get it into arms and so despite your characterization of the campaign I can tell you with 112,000 Belizeans having at least one dose, in my book that is a success."
