MIAMI — The Department of Health and Human Services, not the
Pentagon, shipped 300 doses of swine flu vaccine to the U.S. Navy base at
Guantanamo for a select few among the 6,000 residents, a base spokesman said
Tuesday.
The special shipment was being held at the base hospital and
would be given to “high-risk individuals on the Navy station,” said
Terence Peck, a public affairs officer.
The first 300 was not meant for the 2,000 or so U.S. forces
working at the prison camps “nor for the prisoners,” he added.
Likely candidates included “health care workers”
and “medically high-risk people,” Peck said, adding that officials
would provide a better description of the dose recipients on Thursday following
the Veterans Day holiday.
More than half of the 6,000 people living on the
45-square-mile base in southeast Cuba are civilians. They include the 215
foreign men held as war on terror detainees, some 2,000 Jamaican and Filipino
guest workers and the children and spouses of U.S. sailors and other residents
who bring families to the remote base in southeast Cuba.
The U.S. military touched off a controversy late last month
by deciding to give the military on the base as well as the detainees their
swine flu vaccines first.
“They get all the same quality medical care and treatment
options that are provided to service members,” said prison camps spokesman
Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt. “But they don’t have to wait for
appointments.”
Members of Congress seized on the notion that terror
suspects might get vaccinated before the American public and protested to
Defense Secretary Robert Gates. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs sought to
quiet the firestorm by announcing Nov. 3 that no vaccines had arrived on the
base.
Tuesday, Peck said “the batch that we received for the
naval station came from the Department of Health and Human Services.”
Via McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
