Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh has slammed Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar for her “un­pro­voked and in­flam­ma­to­ry at­tack” on the Gov­ern­ment’s man­age­ment of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly the use of vac­cines.

In a state­ment is­sued yes­ter­day, Deyals­ingh said, “For the record, the COVID-19 vac­cines dis­trib­uted in Trinidad and To­ba­go—Sinopharm, As­traZeneca, Pfiz­er, and John­son & John­son—were all ap­proved by the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO) pri­or to their use, and fol­low our stat­ed pol­i­cy to on­ly use WHO-ap­proved vac­cines. Our health­care pro­fes­sion­als ad­min­is­tered 1,554,804 dos­es, and it is crit­i­cal to note that of the 4,444 COVID-19 deaths, 3,960 or 89.1 per cent were un­vac­ci­nat­ed per­sons.”

He added, “The spe­cif­ic al­le­ga­tion that ‘hun­dreds of thou­sands were giv­en a fake vac­cine’—as quot­ed in a News­day ar­ti­cle dat­ed Sep­tem­ber 11, 2024—must be con­demned.

“The as­ser­tion that a ‘fake vac­cine’ was ad­min­is­tered to cit­i­zens is an af­front to the en­tire pub­lic and pri­vate health sec­tor and im­plies that our doc­tors and nurs­es, and oth­er pub­licly spir­it­ed in­di­vid­u­als who ad­min­is­tered these vac­cines, were com­plic­it in a hoax. The al­le­ga­tions made by the Op­po­si­tion Leader may al­so sug­gest that doc­tors and nurs­es breached their sa­cred oaths.”

The Health Min­is­ter is call­ing for a com­plete re­trac­tion of the Op­po­si­tion Leader’s state­ments, which he de­scribed as “an abuse of free­dom of speech.”

“This pat­tern of ma­li­cious politi­ci­sa­tion of se­ri­ous pub­lic health mat­ters un­der­mines pub­lic trust and con­fi­dence and serves no con­struc­tive pur­pose,” he said.