Haiti - COVID-19 : Will illegals in the Dominican Republic be vaccinated ?
Reacting to the latest statement by Dominican President Luis Abinader regarding the vaccination of undocumented people, Smith Agustín, the Ambassador of Haiti in Santo Domingo said that the President never said (on February 15) that no Haitian could get vaccinated in the Dominican Republic.
Note that in his intervention, Abinader explained that during the vaccination, each Dominican will receive a card allowing him to receive the second dose and that this registration "is one of the problems of undocumented migrants" adding that the Dominican Government does not had not much possibility "to be in solidarity and to contribute" so that the undocumented migrants who are in the country can receive the vaccine against the covid-19. Likewise, he urged countries whose citizens are in an irregular situation on Dominican soil to contribute.
Regarding this statement on the difficulty of his compatriots to be vaccinated for lack of "identity papers", Smith Agustín declared "all Haitians residing in the Dominican Republic are not without papers and say that those who do not have papers will not be vaccinated, that does not mean that they will not have access to vaccination [...] We will wait for what will happen, but I remain optimistic [...]"
If in his last statement the words of the Dominican President are interpretable when he speaks of "paperless" (implicitly without regular migratory status and not without identity paper), his statement in mid January and on the other hand much clearer, he declared "all foreigners in an irregular migratory situation on Dominican territory will not be vaccinated against Covid-19 with the doses of vaccines purchased by the Dominican Government" specifying that for all these people the World Organization of Health will have to provide vaccines at its expense so that they can be vaccinated.
