#BTEditorial – COVID is a matter of public health not public relations

We seem to have reached a topsy-turvy epoch where it is good to consult the citizenry on matters on which it seeks to be informed, better advised, and thoroughly educated.

And we are being told to accept that which is optional as fait accompli and on which we ought to be empowered and involved.

Our politics have long been pervasive and invasive in all aspects of Barbadian life. But our future faces an existential threat and our leaders are being forced to accept that some things will not bend to the will of a vocal minority or ministerial fiat.

We were warned this week by Dr. Clyde Cave, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s leading doctor, that we ought to brace for a new surge of Coronavirus infections.

The more highly contagious, sturdier Delta variant, given new and more potent life as it spreads among the unvaccinated population, is here and beginning to do its worst.

Yet, we fear that the steady, sober assessment by one of our best trained, most qualified and knowledgeable physicians, who possess an intimate knowledge of the microscopically granular world of the Coronavirus was but a still, small voice in a wilderness of rhetoric, driven by debate over rights and freedom, so much of which has already been ceded to a rampant microbe’s dominance.

A cursory reading of the Constitution of Barbados, not a legal opinion from a QC, ought to have told us that our rights are inalienable but not absolute. No rights that infringe on the rights of others are defensible.

Popular activists, politicians, union leaders, and armchair commentators, even the odd amateur calypsonian, invoked the Constitution of Barbados but read it as an American-style document offering entitlement to rights without let or hindrance. It is not.

They gained an additional voice in a series of town hall meetings in which facts of science were trumped by impassioned speech. The megaphone and Twitter-fuelled outrage won the spotlight, COVID be damned.

It is apparent to us that many of the views aired during the recent consultation on vaccine mandates were based on fixed assumptions on a fast-moving target. There was a lot of zealotries but not a zeal to be informed, even to be persuaded.

We debated vaccine mandates even as we struggle to obtain enough jabs to move the needle past the 33 per cent inoculation rate in classic cart-before-horse fashion. At a time when the population requires a steady flow of up-to-the-minute information on the changing faces of the Coronavirus and their implication for our management of the crisis, we have turned a life-or-death medical emergency into a political food fight.

And while our health officials moderate their tone of concern and our politicians amp up their upbeat assessment of welcoming more tourists to our shores, we are pulling the trigger in a game of Russian roulette in which the odds are not stacked in our favour.

Our healthcare system risks being stretched to the breaking point. It is a very real possibility that our general hospital may be filled with COVID-19 patients, gasping for breath, shoving the chronically ill, the gunshot victim, the newborn infant, the accident victim, to a crowded corner of an Accident and Emergency department.

This need not be, and we are no fan of ordering people to take anything in order to keep their jobs. Few adults like the idea of being told what to do. But a virus that has stalked this land for the last year and a half has indeed changed its game while some of us play the same games of denial, rejection, rhetoric, and populism.

The town hall meetings, which ought to have educated our population on what is at stake and the necessity of vaccines and testing, have been hijacked not by experts in virology, pharmacology, and internal medicine, but by false reasoning which equates fact with emotion. Then came our avuncular premier at the weekend to settle a quarrel by taking the path of least political resistance on a matter of public health.

Our Constitution is very clear. All rights have limits. But in the face of a germ more powerful than armies, those limits have already been set.

What we require next is a lot less of the political rhetoric and amateur hour public communication. This virus has commanded our attention and the necessity of continuing to respond with sound medicine, deep compassion, sober conduct, and incorruptible expert professionals. Let’s have more of these dedicated warriors and less of their enthusiastic generals.

Inflexible viewpoints, politicking, and grandstanding are clumsy and blunt tools against a microbe that threatens to become a more efficient killing machine by taking advantage of hubris, ignorance, inequity, and intolerance, sharpening our very weapons against each other on ourselves.