The Superintendent of the Kamloops-Thompson School District says he’s pleased to hear that kids 12 and up in B.C. are now eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine.
Terry Sullivan tells NL News the quicker more people get vaccinated against COVID-19, the quicker we’ll be back to normal life. His comments come as Provincial Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, said kids aged 12 to 17 could be offered a vaccine by the end of the school year.
“So certainly anybody that comes forward and gets vaccinated and anyway we can vaccinate more people, I just think that’s a good thing,” he said. “Hopefully we can vaccinated as many people as possible and if Dr. Henry thinks we can achieve that, I think it is great.”
Henry says adding 12 to 17-year-olds to the province’s vaccine rollout means nearly another 300,000 people needing a dose. But she says health officials will still be able to offer eligible British Columbians a first dose of the COVID vaccine by the end of June.
“We’re working on how do we do that and how do we do it in the most efficient way possible,” Henry said, last Wednesday.
“If all goes as planned in the next few months, so between May and June, we will have quite a lot of vaccines, so we should be able to fit this into our program, and still reach that goal of having at least first doses into the entire population by the end of June.”
As for teachers, Sullivan says some Kamloops-area teachers have been contacted and told to come get a COVID-19 vaccine.
“Teachers and principals are telling me that they’ve been called and they are taking advantage of the opportunity. There’s a few cases where they would be eligible for Pfizer and some of them are opting for that, but what I’m seeing generally is that younger people, when the AstraZeneca becomes available they’re taking advantage of it and they’re being vaccinated,” Sullivan added.
Canada is scheduled to get two million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine this week with Moderna delivering one million doses ahead of schedule last week. Another million Moderna doses is expected next week, with no timeline on when Canada will get more doses of the AstraZeneca or Johnson and Johnson vaccines.
As of Friday, there have been 2,042,442 doses of a COVID-19 vaccine administered in the province, 99,461 of which were second doses.
Nationwide, 1,248,931 people or 3.3 per cent of the population have been fully vaccinated, with a total 15,923,508 vaccine doses administered across Canada as of May 9, 2021.