Excerpt from Devex
On May 5, the governor and premier of Montserrat — a British overseas territory with about 5,000 people — jointly delivered an “urgent appeal” on COVID-19 inoculation, saying 900 vaccine doses are set to expire by the end of the month.
“It would be a travesty, it would be a stain on our island’s reputation, I think, for us to have to throw away these vaccines at a time when people around the world are suffering the ravages of COVID and vaccines are in desperately short supply,” the governor, Andrew Pearce, said during a press conference.
As with Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and the Turks and Caicos Islands, vaccines for Montserrat were procured and delivered by the U.K. government as part of the pandemic support to its territories.
While Gibraltar, which has 34,000 people, has completed its vaccination campaign and the Falkland Islands reported that 74% of the population has received at least one dose, the United Kingdom’s Caribbean territories are posting lower figures.
The rate of people who have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose is 59% in the Cayman Islands, 39% in Anguilla, 31% in the Turks and Caicos Islands, and 26% in the British Virgin Islands.
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