Gorry C

Language: English
References: 2
Page: 19-20
PDF size: 352.77 Kb.

Text Extraction

Soaring summer temperatures, systematic urban and political violence, unreliable infrastructure—power outages, water shortages, sporadic transportation and interruption of other basic services—plus the illness, death and economic straits wrought by COVID-19, are what Haitians awake to every day. On the morning of August 14, 2021, they also woke to the earth in the throes of violent, lethal convulsions caused by a 7.2-magnitude earthquake, along the same fault line responsible for the devastating 2010 disaster and stronger still. As if this weren’t enough, Tropical Storm Grace was bearing down on the nation, about to dump biblical amounts of rain on the heels of Tropical Storm Fred.
When the Haitian President was assassinated on July 7, Haiti still had not received a single dose of any COVID-19 vaccine—indeed, it was the last country in the Americas to receive vaccines. Later that month, 500,000 doses arrived in the country, donated by the United States via COVAX, the WHO-led initiative to assure at least some vaccines reached low- and middle-income countries. In Haiti, getting those vaccines into the arms of the population is beset by cold chain, distribution and bureaucratic problems, and compounded by widespread vaccine hesitancy; when the earthquake struck, only 14,074 of those doses had been administered.

REFERENCES

1. World Health Organization [Internet]. Geneva: World Health Organization;c2021. Haiti: WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard; [cited 2021Aug 16].

2. A June, 2021 survey conducted by the University of Haiti and supported byUNICEF found that only 22% of those interviewed would get vaccinated oncevaccines were available. See: https://reliefweb.int/report/haiti/statement-arrival-fi rst-batch-covid-19-vaccines-haiti