Dear Editor,

I have read the content of Professor Bain’s expert advice submitted to the Supreme Court in Belize by way of assisting in the resolution of a constitutional matter. I will confess that I am flabbergasted beyond all belief that the University of the West Indies (UWI) should choose to dismiss him.

The UWI’s response, via Vice Chancellor E Nigel Harris, is factually unfounded and irrational. I would have thought that, with a report such as it was, Professor Bain should have instead been honoured for his candour, his respect for truth, his professional integrity, and most of all for unflinching fealty to his fiduciary contract with the public as a public health professional.

It has to be that Professor Bain’s dismissal was the direct result of pressure from those who are responsible for funding, since his dismissal has absolutely nothing to defend it. I think the university owes Caribbean citizens, collectively, an official position statement on this dismissal; one that must be scrutinised in the court of informed public opinion.

Should it be that those who are responsible for terminating this professor’s contract are found wanting in their reasons for doing so or, worse yet, that it can be shown that they succumbed to pressure from self-interested financial lobbyists following an idiosyncratic agenda, or indeed to political pressure, then it is they, not Professor Bain, who should be summarily fired for their failure to defend evidence-based scientific fact and for their moral cowardice. For their capitulation strikes at the very raison d’être of the university’s existence as a resource for higher learning and truth.

Dr Steve Smith, FRCP

icteruss@yahoo.com