PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi has crit­i­cised some in­di­vid­u­als’ at­tempts to dis­cred­it the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency’s (CARPHA) ac­cu­ra­cy with test­ing for COVID-19.

“There is con­fi­dence in the sys­tem man­aged by CARPHA. For us to try and sub­vert the con­fi­dence in­side of that is dan­ger­ous not on­ly for Trinidad and To­ba­go and the psy­che of our pop­u­la­tion but for the en­tire Caribbean be­cause CARPHA does the test­ing for the Caribbean,” Al-Rawi said dur­ing yes­ter­day’s Min­istry of Health vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on COVID-19 as he ref­er­enced a with­drawn emer­gency law­suit filed by tele­vi­sion host Ian Al­leyne.

On Thurs­day, dur­ing a vir­tu­al hear­ing be­fore Jus­tice Ricky Rahim, Al­leyne’s at­tor­ney Ger­ald Ramdeen with­drew the claim af­ter read­ing af­fi­davits filed by of­fi­cials from the Min­istry of Health.

Yes­ter­day, the AG said the mat­ter was un­for­tu­nate.

“Un­for­tu­nate­ly, a mat­ter came be­fore the court. That mat­ter was with­drawn yes­ter­day by Mr Ramdeen, re­al­ly be­cause he ac­cept­ed that his client had test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID. In fact, when we re­viewed the au­dio­tapes of in­ter­views by Mr Ramdeen and by his client, there was an ad­mis­sion that they al­ready knew that even be­fore they went to court,” Al-Rawi said.

De­spite the with­draw­al of the mat­ter, Ramdeen said the State’s ev­i­dence raised is­sues with the COVID-19 test­ing process his client was sub­ject­ed to while in quar­an­tine at the Cau­ra Hos­pi­tal over the past three weeks. This claim was, how­ev­er, de­scribed as “fun­da­men­tal­ly false” by the state’s at­tor­ney, Regi­nald Ar­mour SC.

Ramdeen’s claim was al­so ad­dressed by the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al.

“Now that the mat­ter is fin­ished, I can tell you that there is a very dan­ger­ous slant brought to that equa­tion where the cred­i­bil­i­ty of CARPHA test­ing was brought in­to is­sue. Con­trary to blog­ging and ac­tiv­i­ty on cer­tain web pages, I want to state that Se­nior Coun­sel Mr Regi­nald Ar­mour made it very clear to the ho­n­ourable court yes­ter­day (Thurs­day) that there was a dan­ger­ous ex­er­cise of sub­ver­sion of the con­fi­dence of the CARPHA test­ing. The CARPHA test­ing has nev­er proved to be wrong. In that par­tic­u­lar case there was a sim­ple tran­scrip­tion or hu­man er­ror point, which is nor­mal,” Al-Rawi said.

The At­tor­ney Gen­er­al, how­ev­er, said that due to the “hu­man er­ror”, the au­to­mat­ic on­line ser­vice at Trinidad Pub­lic Health Lab, which was pre­vi­ous­ly used to alert var­i­ous hos­pi­tals about the sta­tus of COVID pa­tients, was dis­card­ed for the time be­ing.

“So be­cause of the ac­tiv­i­ty tak­en by the Op­po­si­tion in chal­leng­ing the use of tech­nol­o­gy which would have as­sist­ed every­body’s ben­e­fit, so we would have had a re­al-time un­der­stand­ing to be pre­pared … You can pre­pare dis­charge pa­pers but await the fi­nal copy et cetera, we’ve had to close that down tem­porar­i­ly to relook at the sys­tem. So we’re en­tire­ly man­u­al right now,” the AG said.

Al-Rawi al­so ad­mit­ted that he penned the re­sponse to Ramdeen’s pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter on be­half of Al­leyne, which iden­ti­fied both men as po­lit­i­cal­ly af­fil­i­at­ed.

“That let­ter was square­ly writ­ten by me and you’ll no­tice in the first and last para­graphs that I was at pains to pro­tect the of­fi­cer who I had asked to push that let­ter for­ward, by say­ing that this was done by the spe­cif­ic di­rec­tion of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al. So I take own­er­ship of that let­ter and its con­tents,” he said.

”And yes, I’d like to say that, look, pol­i­tics is part of the equa­tion. A gov­ern­ment is po­lit­i­cal­ly ap­point­ed. Hope­ful­ly, you’ve no­ticed that we’ve been at pains to avoid cer­tain things but in par­tic­u­lar, the ref­er­ence to the line that says it sure­ly can­not be lost among the av­er­age ob­serv­er that both per­sons, the at­tor­ney and the en­ti­ty, the talk show host, have been sit­ting, have been ac­tive politi­cians for the op­po­si­tion.”

He al­so stat­ed that he wrote the let­ter so that he could claim wast­ed costs from Ramdeen.

“I draft­ed the let­ter my­self and I put it there so that the pop­u­la­tion could be as­sured if the ac­tion was pur­sued and pre­ma­ture­ly and ill-ad­vised so that we re­serve the right to seek a wast­ed court or­der against the at­tor­ney at law him­self in the mat­ter,” he said.