The Bahamas like many places in the Caribbean is dealing with a high level of coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine hesitancy in the population.

And as young children become eligible to be vaccinated, Dr Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States, has urged Bahamians to allow their children to get vaccinated.

Children between 5 and 11 were recently approved to receive a smaller dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

Children will receive two doses of the vaccine three weeks apart to become fully vaccinated.

Speaking today on Guardian Radio 96.9 FM, Fauci noted that the US has recorded over 2 million COVID-19 cases in children from the age group of which 83,000 required some form of hospitalisation.

According to Fauci, several thousand of those children developed the rare multisystem inflammatory syndrome and about 100 did not leave the hospital alive.

“Even though it is very clear that children do not generally get a serious case of COVID-19 as adults do but that doesn’t mean they are exempt from getting serious disease,” he said while noting that many children are asymptomatic and have spread the virus to people who are at risk of becoming extremely sick.

Fauci said the benefits of taking the vaccine far outweigh any of the perceived risks since vaccinated persons have a better chance of fighting the virus.

As of November 6, 136,328 eligible Bahamians are fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

This figure represents over 33 per cent of the population.

The Bahamas inoculated its residents with the Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Sinopharm and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines.

Fauci added that people who are angry with him and other public health officials should “try to just drop back a few yards and think about what’s going on.”

“You have around you an outbreak. The people who are talking about getting vaccinated, the people who are developing the vaccines, are doing it to save lives and to prevent suffering; not to encroach on your civil liberties to decide what you want to do.”

“We are already right now in the middle of a historic, catastrophic outbreak that at least in a country like the United States has killed 750,000 people. That’s unheard of. That is the kind of thing they should focus on. The enemy is the virus.”

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