By Earl Bousquet
Not right or healthy with COVID-19!
It was expected that the defeated United Workers Party (UWP) wouldn’t have taken long after the July 26 poll to continue politicizing the COVID pandemic. But (maybe) not so fast.
While its leader continues enjoying his Maple Leaf holiday in his other adopted homeland and the COVID crisis his government left behind starts to yield the results of the outgoing administration’s throwing off all COVID caution to the wind during last month’s 21-day election campaign, his party issued a statement last weekend, less than a week after the first meeting of the new parliament – saying it was ‘alarmed’ about the rise in COVID-19 cases and calling on the government to ‘act decisively’ to ‘arrest this national health crisis’ and ‘avert any further loss of life.’
It didn’t seem to matter that the rapid rise in case numbers and deaths after the election might be proof that the dreaded Delta variant could have arrived here during the election campaign when the government dropped the ball on adherence to and policing of the COVID protocols.
Or that the number of cases had surpassed 7,000 and deaths sped closer to 100 as unvaccinated people take up the few hospital beds available after the last administration did sweet nothing to increase the number, instead of monetizing testing and quarantine and sending hundreds to ‘home quarantine’ at great risk and consequences for home, family and community.
Or that the caseload was so overwhelming that public and private doctors were taking to the press and social media to express their alarm at the rise in caseloads caused by the lowering of the national guard during the elections campaign.
Or that, despite activation of an eight-month national COVID emergency with ongoing national curfews and lockdowns (up to and since election day) that would extend at least to October (240 days of non-stop pandemic fatigue) provided fertile ground for preachers of pandemic doom and gloom and creators of conspiracy theories to turn innocent people against themselves.
Or that never mind all the leadership provided to the Command Center by the loquacious former tourism minister (instead of the minister for health and wellness) and despite the best efforts of the information teams at GIS and NTN, the last government’s COVID- messaging never effectively got across as intended.
It didn’t matter that during its 16 months in charge of fighting the COVID-19 crisis, the island’s record of infections and deaths doubled that of all of the rest of the OECS put together and Herd Immunity became nothing but a sheepish phrase.
Or that there was early proof that vaccination levels had peaked as far back as June and hesitance, mistrust and absolute refusal led to several instances of dumping expired vaccines. It didn’t matter that the chief medical officer and the president of the local doctors’ association (SLMDA) both warned – before election day – that the careless promotion of a carnival atmosphere during the campaign’s final week could open the way for the new fourth COVID wave that started within a week after the elections.
Nor did it matter that long before the elections were called, unvaccinated persons were already largely influenced by the ‘Bad News’ about vaccines efficacy, the lies about vaccines having microchips, or that many here were/are openly saying they will not vaccinate until and unless ‘the Cuban vaccine arrives’.
Or that the last UWP government insisted on waiting for the much-delayed, less costly COVAX-promised Oxford-AstraZeneca deliveries from the Serum Institute of India (SII), which further slowed down after India got hit by the variant now named Delta.
Or that there was ‘Not a word, Not a word, Not a word’ from the outgoing government after popular lawyer and election candidate Richard Frederick referred on TV to a private arrangement for vaccine imports that smacked of both nepotism and unhealthy cost overruns.
Or that it was sounding like the UWP had engaged emergency selective amnesia to forget that the 2001-2006 SLP administration undertook a national project to construct three brand-new hospitals that were near completion before the 2006 elections, which the then UWP administration put on the back burner for the next five years.
The party seemed to have undertaken to conveniently forget too, that the subsequent 2011-2016 labor administration did all it could to ensure the new OKEU hospital was commissioned in keeping with required standards for the biggest European Union-funded project in the Eastern Caribbean.
And that the last labour administration eventually put the Millennium Highway Wellness Center to its originally intended use – caring for the mentally unwell, providing services for persons considering suicide, etc.
Or that it also fast-tracked completion of the St Jude hospital and brought it close to commissioning up to the 2016 elections, which the SLP lost – at a deadly cost to the project.
It didn’t seem to matter that for a second five-year term in 15 years, the UWP invented unbelievable reasons to put completion of all three labour-inspired hospital projects on the government’s back burner. It didn’t seem to matter either, that if two UWP administrations had not stopped the three new hospital projects, COVID-19 in 2020 would have met Saint Lucia with more than the barely 200 beds available at the time (for a population of 180,000) when the pandemic was declared.
But while it does matter that the new government is not playing the blame game, in planning ahead it cannot afford not to look back at how it got what it’s inherited. What matters most, though, is that the Delta variant is here – and it’s this new administration’s immediate and urgent task and responsibility to say and do what is needed to bring the worsening situation under control.
It inherited a COVID policy that absolutely ignored the numbers and the science and opted instead to subject the nation’s health and wellness to a series of irrational, irresponsible, questionable and costly stops and restarts.
The numbers said it all – and from very early: It took much longer for the number of persons testing positive to move from 5,000 to 6,000 and half that time from 6,000 to 7000, as with the number of Active Cases doubling from 500 to 1,000.
Same with the science: 99.9 percent of persons hospitalized for and dying from COVID-related causes are/were unvaccinated, and no one has died here as a direct result of taking a COVID vaccination.
Prime minister Philip Pierre, who has repeatedly stated his government’s COVID policy will be driven by the numbers and the Science, has also commendably sworn he will not abandon the COVID fight to the naysayers and the mind-benders applying the science of untruths through sophisticated horror stories targeted at the society’s most vulnerable.
Now he needs to ensure his Cabinet ministers also follow the numbers and the science. COVID-19 and the Delta variant are not matters to be left to calls of conscience government and health officials and it would help if all at least make their vaccination status known.
We only need to look at Canada, where members of the Provincial Parliament (MPP) are banned from attending meetings if they don’t vaccinate – and one was expelled from his party just last week, after revealing he and his wife had decided not to vaccinate ‘for personal reasons’.
The new Saint Lucia government must also carefully avoid falling into the trap of discussing diversionary side-show issues like ‘rights’ and ‘mandates’ without also including the government’s corresponding sacred ‘duties’ and ‘responsibilities’ to protect the entire nation’s health, as elected to.
No legal argument can justify anyone having (far less claiming) a ‘right’ to endanger the lives of others – even themselves, far less their families, relatives, friends and members of the public.
Both the science and the numbers have proven that fact, which is why Canada, Britain, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and other countries losing more lives and in the COVID fight for much longer than Saint Lucia are not prescribing or mandating vaccination, but simply making vaccination an emergency national health requirement.
Countries across the world are quickly coming to the conclusion that unvaccinated people are a danger to themselves and the rest of the society and vaccinated persons definitely need to be protected against the unvaccinated – and which can only be done by making it a legal requirement for people to choose between risking and saving their lives and avoiding eventually becoming carriers and transmitters of the most-deadly virus of the 21st Century.
The new administration must also avoid going out of the way to sound politically correct, which is wholly incorrect when it comes to COVID-19, as the issue is not about just sounding right, but saying and doing what’s right.
As such, government ministers and decision-makers must not cower to individual sensitivities of those misleading and the misled victims of Fake COVID News and Conspiracy Theories and say what they (who have the nation here in the first place) want to hear.
No government driven by numbers and science can offer flat-out guarantees that people who opt to simply continue to threaten the nation’s health and the wider good by refusing to vaccinate – and/or encouraging others not to – will never be required to make a choice between dying and saving lives – including their own.
Too many citizens 65-and-over (with underlying conditions) and under-18s remain unvaccinated to their possible peril, most because they have been misled into disbelieving national health cautions and ignoring protocols, simply confused by the deadly propaganda, or legally under-aged and requiring parents and guardians’ permission.
The government must therefore continue to try to consciously disregard the UWPs sudden discovery of its lost tongue and instead insist that Saint Lucians face up to the reality of today’s COVID challenge that continues to threaten to force the new government to do what all others have refused or failed to: create new cemeteries.
Political correctness, in the COVID-19 context in 2021’s age of the Delta variant, is as much (and no less) a suicide prescription as advice against vaccination – and should be avoided by decision-makers at all costs, if only to save lives.
