Gail Alexan­der

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh says he has to study state­ments by the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion’s (WHO’s) Dr David Nabar­ro who has urged world lead­ers to stop “lock­downs” con­tin­u­ing as the pri­ma­ry means of con­trol­ling the COVID-19 virus.

Since Feb­ru­ary Nabar­ro’s worked for the WHO’s Di­rec­tor-Gen­er­al as­sist­ing in deal­ing with the pan­dem­ic. The WHO ad­vo­cat­ed lock­downs when the pan­dem­ic be­gan.

T&T has been open­ing up the econ­o­my bit by bit. Last Sat­ur­day, num­bers for pub­lic gath­er­ings were in­creased from five to 10 but some re­stric­tions re­main.

Nabar­ro’s state­ment was on an Aus­tralian news site head­lined: “WHO back­flips on virus stance by con­demn­ing lock­downs.”

Nabar­ro said, “We in the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO) do not ad­vo­cate lock­downs as the pri­ma­ry means of con­trol of this virus,”

“The on­ly time we be­lieve a lock­down is jus­ti­fied is to buy you time to re­or­gan­ise, re­groups, re­bal­ance your re­sources, pro­tect your health work­ers who are ex­haust­ed— but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”

He said the on­ly thing lock­downs achieved was pover­ty with no men­tion of lives saved.”

Nabar­ro cit­ed neg­a­tive im­pact of lock­downs on tourism in the Caribbean and Pa­cif­ic, “…..Be­cause peo­ple aren’t tak­ing their hol­i­days.”

Nabar­ro urged lead­ers to de­vel­op bet­ter sys­tems as pri­ma­ry meth­ods to con­tain the virus, “Work to­geth­er, learn from each oth­er.”

Deyals­ingh said he had no com­ment at this time.

“It has to be stud­ied,” he said.

Nabar­ro’s state­ment in­clud­ed, “Look what’s hap­pen­ing to small hold­ers farm­ers all over the world….to pover­ty lev­els, it seems we may well have a dou­bling of world pover­ty by next year. We may well have at least a dou­bling of child mal­nu­tri­tion.”

“Lock­downs just have one con­se­quence that you must nev­er be­lit­tle - and that is mak­ing poor peo­ple an aw­ful lot poor­er.”