And one resident who had some issues with the future regulation is Shane Williams. The former candidate for the Belize City Council and president of the Belize Softball Association, said that he feels the government has not considered the obstacles faced by certain residents such as those in his Kraal Road community. These challenges range from not being able to walk on the street safely to not having any form of identification and are compounded by a severe lack of information regarding the vaccine. And as Williams pointed, many of these people cannot afford to take a test every few days.
Shane Williams - Providing Transportation for Vaccination
"People in my community won't over to the other side to go to a clinic, look where we are, this is Kraal Road, the nearest clinics are the Port Loyola and over there at Matron Roberts, so there is a lot of people who won't go over there because of obvious reasons, so I said that when I was campaigning for city council I said if I was going to pick them up to take them to a voting place, I must be able to go pick them up and take them to the clinic. It has been difficult to get people to go because of all the misinformation but I've been constantly trying, I've been here to answer any question and provide the relevant materials from credible websites for them whenever questions are asked but the people in my community have a lot of questions that need to be answered. They don't want to hear any songs about going to get vaxxed, they don't want to hear any orders from high society people, they want people come into our community and answer basic questions. After you finally convince them to go and take the vaccine which is already difficult, you find out they don't have any official ID, some don't even have birth paper, so one of the most difficult things is to finally get someone to say yes, okay make I go take it and find out they don't have ID and they can't take the vaccine, so that is a big impediment, it's a big deterrent and something needs to be done about that. I urge the government to reconsider, maybe they can start with recreational places but not the basic public places. I just want to make it clear that I fully support the government's vaccination campaign and I am prepared to even fully support this new proposal they have but they must put things in place to make sure that people can have access to their IDs, free of cost, so it's not another burden on the backs of poor people. Before we introduce something on October 1st, let us go on an ID drive, an ID access drive for people in my community so that they can have their IDs so they are not left out again."
Williams said he's willing to support the regulation, but first some kinks need to be ironed out.
