PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad (CMC) — The Trinidad and Tobago government Saturday announced the appointment of a five-member team of medical experts to look into the operations of the health sector during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The government has also postponed for a month, the need for public sector workers to be fully vaccinated.

Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, speaking at a news conference, said that the experts will be given a week to complete their assignment and that the report, regardless of its contents, will be made public.

The expert team will be chaired by Professor Terence Seemungal, Dean, Faculty of Medical Sciences, at the University of the West Indies and Rowley said “they will go into our health care system, examine it and at the end of the week…they will report back to the government”.

“I give the country the assurance that as soon as I get that report, whatever it contains it will be made public and I do that so that the population can be guided away, we can’t guide you away from the Google doctors…we can’t get you away from the Facebook specialists, but we can guide you away from believing that health care in the hospital is substandard and is contributing to the deaths we are facing (from COVID).

“If it is you have to confront the deaths as part of the outcome of the COVID infections and the way to explain that is to say these people would not have died because there is something going wrong in the hospitals, I have to send the experts in now to respond to that and I will await the report they will make to the people of Trinidad and Tobago,” Rowley said, praising the front line health care workers who have been dealing with the pandemic since 2020.

Trinidad and Tobago has recorded 3,156 deaths and 99,780 infections from the virus since March 2020.

Rowley told reporters that the government had been encouraged by the response to the early position outlined by his administration for public servants to be vaccinated by January 17 as the authorities had intended to declare the public sector as being a safe zone.

The trade unions here have been urging workers to ignore the position of the government and Rowley said he had received communication from the Joint Trade Union Movement (JTUM), with recommendations which the government would not accept.

He said, in short, the communication gave the impression “let us leave it to choice and who live, live, and who dead, dead,” adding that a government in this pandemic cannot accept such a position where a virus has killed millions of people globally and more than 3,000 people in Trinidad and Tobago.

“We are not making COVID policy only for people working for the state,” Rowley, adding that the “government is not prepared to get into a fight with anybody and the government is prepared to defend the people of Trinidad and Tobago…”

He read an excerpt of the JTUM letter in which the trade unions claimed “it is clear that the policy being advanced by the state is predicated on what appears to be purported expert opinion and evidence”.

Rowley said that this language does not support the government of Trinidad and Tobago, dismissing also suggestions that the death certificates issued by the medical authorities are wrong.

“The best person to put data on a death certificate are the people authorised by the law and that’s the health experts,” Rowley said.

Rowley said that the government had also received communication from several stakeholders including the joint chambers of commerce, who have asked for their businesses, including factories and other sites as “quasi safe zones and therefore require all of their to be vaccinated with exemption on valid medical grounds”.

“They have also said that employers should have the flexibility to determine their own policies on how employees who refuse to abide by their vaccination policy…including placing employees on no-paid leave,” Rowley said, explaining that the private sector employers are seeking to minimise a broad use of the sick leave situations.

“They would like as employers to have a say in who issues those medical exemptions for people. What this means, ladies and gentlemen is that our population in the private sector and in the government, we are readying ourselves for living with the virus not knowing when it is going to end [and] this thing is going to go on for quite a long time apparently.