Government Member of Parliament and Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony says that while the main Parliamentary Opposition continues to lambaste the government for not having a plan to deal with COVID-19 pandemic, it was the Coalition that let slip the opportunity to stop the virus in its tracks. He made this retort during his budget presentation in the House today at the Arthur Chung Convention Centre (ACCC) today.
“They came here and said that we don’t have a plan for COVID-19, but if you examine what they did after our first case on the 11th March, 2020. If they were so effective, and if they had such a good plan, then after we had the first case and the first death, they would have been able to do all the contact tracing and we would have liquidated COVID-19 from Guyana. But the truth was that they were in shambles; they did not know what to do, and so, they were scrambling for a response.,” Dr Anthony said.
He added that after the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) got into government, it immediately began enhancing Guyana’s testing capacity. The administration, he said, is now “moving to the next stage” of the response by the rollout of vaccines.
“Tomorrow morning we’ll be getting 20,000 more vaccines that will be coming in, and we will be using that to immunize our frontline workers. On the 8th March – International Women’s Day – we’ll be getting 80,000 more vaccines for the people of this country. And later in the month, we’ll be getting another 100,000 through the COVAX mechanism, so we can immunize our population. Mr Speaker, if this is not a plan, that what else is a plan? This is what is going to get us out of COVID-19,” he said.
Dr Anthony thanked the Chinese, Indian and Barbadian governments for their donations.
