OPPOSITION Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar is standing by her call for a commission of enquiry (CoE) into Government’s handling of the covid19 pandemic.
She also chastised the Prime Minister for statements about Guyana being reckless with its vaccination programme and also the PM's “doubling down on his attack,” when Guyana rebuked him.
She also condemned the 450 job losses at Caribbean Airlines, questioning whether a minister’s son was among those on the breadline.
“We have no idea when we can actually get back to some resemblance of normalcy. While the world opens up, we remain under lockdown,” she observed at a UNC virtual platform on Monday night.
Pointing out in the last 16 months, 700 covid19 deaths have been recorded, 100 more since she made the initial call a week ago, Persad-Bissessar asked, “How many more must die before changes are made?”
“The Ministry of Health team appears to continuously be justifying themselves and praising their own efforts, ignoring that we now have among the highest covid death rates in the world,” she said.
She thanked former MP Dr Tim Gopeesingh for supporting her call, unlike others, she said, who benefited from the UNC but now chose to “parrot PNM propaganda.”
Gopeesingh said earlier that after 16 months, the country has no information nor answers, data or analyses of the situation surrounding the deaths.
He said Government must account to the people through the CoE with a view to determining whether the deaths of 761 people (as of Tuesday) were in fact due to criminal negligence.
Persad-Bissessar also read a Facebook post from someone whose father reportedly languished for four days in the accident and emergency departments of several hospitals waiting for treatment and a bed, until he died of the virus on Father’s Day.
In the post the grieving child wrote, “My dad may have had covid but covid didn’t kill him, negligence and lack of proper treatment killed him.”
The writer was quoted as saying the father tested positive on June 18 and also developed a blood clot in his lung. On June 21, he died in the A&E at Mt Hope without ever being treated. Persad-Bissessar said the future of the country remains uncertain under the Prime Minister.
“Just to remind you how nothing they say can be trusted: just over two weeks ago the Prime Minister and his Minister of Health boasted that close to one million doses of vaccines were on the way.
“They invited everyone to come and get vaccinated, leading to absolute chaos at the health facilities.
“When they realised they did foolish things, they apologised and pretended it wasn’t a big deal. Mind you, this week we will see if the chaos of those few days were superspreader events.
“Now this week the Prime Minister is saying, 'well, we were expecting donations from the United States, but we don’t know if that is still happening, and then the order of 800,000 from the Africa Medical Supplies Platform – we not sure to get those either.
“And the citizens are supposed to just accept this? This is what passes for gov
