Health officials in the Eastern Caribbean and Barbados have been forced to dump as many as 62,000 doses of COVID-19, according to Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) figures.
The area’s lowest vaccination rates hover at between one-in-four and a third in four nations – St Vincent and the Grenadines (26 per cent), St Lucia (29 per cent), Montserrat (31 per cent) and Grenada (35 per cent).
Almost two in five Dominicans (39 per cent) have received the COVID jab while rates in Barbados (53 per cent) and St Kitts and Nevis (49 per cent) hover around half of the total population. Nearly six in ten Antiguans (59 per cent) have received the vaccination with the highest rates being recorded in two British dependent territories – Anguilla (64 per cent) and the British Virgin Islands (60 per cent).
The development comes as the World Health Organization has set a new target of a 70 per cent vaccination rate for all countries by June 2022 in order to slow down the spread of COVID-19.
