 A pleasant good day everyone and welcome to the handover ceremony of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine from the United Kingdom. First I will call on the National Immunization Manager Tecla Jabatis to brief us with some opening remarks. COVID-19 continues to affect the population and we remain committed to the fight against this pandemic. St. Lucia has reported 22,688 cases of COVID-19 to date, having just experienced a fifth wave, noting the circulation of both Delta and Omicron variants. The national COVID-19 vaccination campaign was launched approximately one year ago, implementing several strategies to promote and ensure uptake of the vaccine. As of the 26th of February 2022, approximately 28.7% of the population is fully vaccinated. Fighting the pandemic has proven to be a challenge, but we remain resolute to this fight. The Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs, and by extension the Government of St. Lucia continues to ensure that safe and effective vaccines are available. COVID-19 vaccines undoubtedly has proven to be highly effective, providing significant protection against severe disease hospitalization and death. Today we are here to accept a generous donation of 10,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from the United Kingdom. The donation of these vaccines is timely. It comes at a time when the country has been out of stock for the past month. These vaccines continue to provide life-saving benefits to the people of St. Lucia and increases availability to the eligible population as part of our national effort to reach population immunity and help bring an end to this pandemic. It's a pleasure to be here with you this morning. It's actually almost a year ago exactly that my predecessor stood on the tarmac with the Chief Medical Officer and received the first batch of COVID-19 vaccinations that arrived from COVAX on the 7th of April 2021. The UK was very proud to have been one of the driving forces behind the creation of COVAX with funding of almost 2 billion East Caribbean dollars to provide vaccines for St. Lucia and other countries. It's hard to believe where the time has gone. And then in June last year our Prime Minister pledged that the UK would provide 100 million vaccines but not only by the middle of this year but not only AstraZeneca and 80% of those will be provided by COVAX and the rest will be bilateral donations like the one we have here today. The Chief Medical Officer and I have been in regular touch since that pledge was made by our Prime Minister while the Chief Medical Officer has been monitoring the demand and keeping an eye on minimizing the wastage of stocks here in St. Lucia. And that's why we're here today to deliver the consignment of 10,000 doses of Oxford AstraZeneca that St. Lucia needs now. Just for background the UK government provided £90 million to Oxford AstraZeneca for the initial research and development of the vaccination and to scale up the manufacturing that was going to be so badly needed for distribution globally. The UK made it clear that part of that funding was that the vaccines would be affordable around the world and consequently Oxford AstraZeneca agreed to distribute it as a non-profit price during the pandemic. It was to put people over profit. This year I think we're all sensing a change in our daily life as we come through the latest waves of the pandemic. But as the immunization manager has said, COVID is still with us. It's not over and we all know from research or from our own stories of families and friends that who've had the virus that following the protocols and having vaccine protection are still important. It really can be the difference between severity of the illness, hospitalisation and life and death even with a variant like Omicron. Just to close these brief remarks I really want to add our thanks and admiration to all those on the front line who've been part of managing the pandemic here in St. Lucia for their commitment and resilience and stamina and service over the last two years. It really has been incredible. Thank you all. I hope we can all get those vaccines into people's arms as soon as possible and keep each other safe. So thank you and stay safe. Let me see how pleased I am this morning to have met Excellency Sanderson and also to have had some wonderful discussions with her. Let me say thanks on behalf of the people of St. Lucia. Thanks to the people of the United Kingdom, to the government and people of the United Kingdom for this donation of 10,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The people of the United Kingdom continue to battle COVID-19. They're still at war with COVID-19. The people are still getting infected and some people unfortunately have died. Yet they have found it possible to use their resources and to share their resources with us even in the middle of this war. I wish to say how pleased we are and how grateful we are. All around the world countries are recognizing and have recognized that we must all fight the pandemic together. It is not a situation where St. Lucia can fight it on its own or the United Kingdom or the United States. And we are very thankful for the resources which the people of the United Kingdom and the government of the United Kingdom continue to provide. We continue to be thankful for the many projects, the SMART facility projects and the many forms of assistance which the government of the United Kingdom continue to provide to the people of St. Lucia. Our history is long and our friendship is long. And we continue to say thanks to the people and government of the United Kingdom for all all of what they've done especially in the area of healthcare and wellness and so on for St. Lucia. In St. Lucia we will have to certainly continue to fight the COVID-19 pandemic but we will definitely have to fight it in a different way. There are many new approaches which must be taken and I am sure our chief medical officer and other and our other medical professionals will make the necessary announcements sometime this week. We will have to learn how to live and learn how to work and at the same time fight COVID in different ways. We need to learn how to protect ourselves and we need to learn how to take even more personal responsibility to ensure that we keep ourselves and our families safe. This gift will go a very long way. We have a serious issue in St. Lucia with hesitancy and we will have to find new ways, new strategies and new approaches to cause more of our people to get these shots into their arms. It's going to be challenging but we continue to ask if there are any lessons even in the United Kingdom. If there are any lessons with hesitancy and maybe you know your Excellency probably use some strategies and you may want to share these strategies but we admit and accept that we have a challenge and over the next few weeks we will have to find as a ministry, as a country, we'll have to find ways as politicians, as doctors, you know, we'll have to find ways to break that hesitancy and to get more people protected. So I wish to thank you and I wish to thank the government and people of the United Kingdom and to see that we really appreciate we're going to do our very best and we will do it from today. I will take a few minutes to speak in Quiole so that our people can get the message. I would like to thank Excellency Leslie Sunderson who is the Chief Representative of the United Kingdom of England with his country, England. He is the Chief Representative of the United Kingdom and I would like to thank him for his kind of support. with COVID-19, but I want to thank the people who help us with this. We are here to play a different way to fight COVID-19. We know that every country has its own country. Every time we have a protocol, we can change it. We want to help people more to protect themselves from COVID-19. We have an announcement from the Medical Chief Medical Officer with a lot of people who made this announcement. We want to change the way we call quarantine. But we want to help people who are more responsible for not playing with COVID-19. We want to do this because the system will give us a lot of pressure if we don't do this because the more people who are sick, the more people who are sick, the more people who are sick, the more pressure the hospital will have. We are all working together, and we want to thank the government of England and the Excellency, Leslie Sanderson, for helping us with this. We are working together today to help all those who want this vaccine. We know that. Thank you very much.