It could be that Dr Christopher Tufton, the health and wellness minister, is panicking over calls for his resignation from inside and outside his party, but his statement in Parliament, Tuesday, about the latest dead babies scandal is decidedly unhelpful.

Bright as he is, Dr Tufton knows that to be comparing one dastardly episode when 19 babies died in hospital to another heinous one in which 11 babies died is absolutely no consolation to the parents, and is, indeed, insensitive.

Under the health minister’s watch, 11 neonates died in a recent outbreak of klebsiella pneumoniae infections at Victoria Jubilee Hospital (VJH), Jamaica’s major maternity hospital. His comparison was to then Health Minister Dr Fenton Ferguson’s watch, when 19 premature babies died from infections at University Hospital of the West Indies in St Andrew and Cornwall Regional Hospital in St James in 2015.

Responding to Opposition calls for his ouster, Dr Tufton told the House of Representatives: “It is unworthy to compare what transpired in 2015 because the circumstances [are] so much different. I am trying to be very gracious because I don’t want to appear to be politicising public health.

“That 2015 incident, for all sorts of reasons, generated significant anxiety around how the then Administration was managing the situation. In our case, we discovered a problem and we fixed the problem, and that’s the most important issue to consider.”

Dr Tufton might find it unpalatable to compare the circumstances under which the babies died whether now or in 2015, but he might wish to consider that the then minister, Dr Ferguson, was reassigned to another ministerial portfolio.

In other words, when such a major traumatic event takes place in which the lives of anyone, including babies, are lost, someone should be held accountable, even if we do not have a culture of government officials resigning (Mr Floyd Green being an outlier).

The health minister made matters worse by suggesting that the public was kept in the dark about the VJH matter so as not to create “unnecessary hysteria” that could “potentially discourage people from going to VJH, which is the sole option for some”.

The “some” he refers to here are the mostly poor who use VJH to have their babies, and the further implication of his statement is that they should not be informed that babies are dying from infections at the hospital.

Continuing down this slippery slope, Dr Tufton then cautions the public against “undue hysteria”, citing mortality figures showing that an average of 150-180 newborns die annually in hospitals.

The reason he gave for the latest VJH bacterial outbreak was staff shortage, issues with cleaning, and overcrowding of the facility. Nor could the neonates have been transferred to other facilities because of overcrowding at several others, including at Bustamante Hospital for Children in St Andrew.

We are forced to ask why would the minister think that mothers and their spouses would not be hysterical over losing their babies, especially in such avoidable circumstances?

While the minister spouts excuses for the deaths of babies, he would be best advised to spend more of his energy improving the health infrastructure to deliver better health care to our long-suffering public.