Editorial | PM, MPs must vaccinate now

Senior government officials, including Prime Minister Andrew Holness and his Cabinet, are no longer among the first group of Jamaicans to receive COVID-19 vaccinations. The administration changed its mind because it feared nascent public criticism of the plan. Or, as the health minister, Dr Christopher Tufton, put it, the prospect of Prime Minister Holness and himself being at the head of the queue would have diverted attention from more important issues.

“We felt it’s a distraction that was not worth it,” Dr Tufton told T he Gleaner. The risk that he, the PM, and other elected officials, face if they caught the disease, it might be argued, he said, was what “they signed up for in this job”.

The minister is wrong on two counts, the first of which is already very obvious. The greater distraction, which almost anyone could have told the PM and Dr Tufton, is their decision to wait until additional supplies of vaccination are received and more Jamaicans can be inoculated, before they take the jab. That could be later this month, or sometime in April. Their action has provided conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, or just people who are wary about being at the head of the line, with a perch from which to spread distrust about the safety of a drug.

Missed opportunity

The prime minister and Dr Tufton, the Government’s key spokesmen on the COVID-19 pandemic, lost an opportunity to lead from the front, and by example. If the prime minister and the health minister were too afraid, too sceptical of the vaccine to be inoculated, the critics will, and have argued – no matter how outrageous the claim – why should other people have that trust and put themselves at risk? There are perhaps 40 per cent of Jamaicans in this category of questioners, some of whom are disposed to being won over.

Apart from squandering the chance for demonstration effect, there is a larger and more fundamental principle why Mr Holness, the members of the political executive, and all members of the legislature should be immediately vaccinated. This group, on practical and symbolic terms, is critical to the maintenance of Jamaica’s constitutional democracy and the functioning of the Jamaican State. This idea of the state is not an amorphous or abstract concept. It does not reside merely in textbooks. It is lived every day through the actions and activities of Government.

Indeed, Jamaicans are agreed on an overarching constitutional arrangement by which we govern ourselves and give expression to our aspirations as a society. We, for instance, periodically hold elections to choose the people who make the laws, and from among whom a set is given the authority to oversee the day-to-day affairs of the country.

The people charged with these responsibilities are not automatons. They, like the rest of us, are human beings, with all the frailties of being flesh and blood and bones and sinew like the more-than-32,000 Jamaicans who have so far tested positive for COVID-19, are susceptible to diseases and other medical conditions. Except, COVID-19 is not a normal circumstance. We are in a raging pandemic, which, like most communicable diseases, has proven its capacity to spread in clusters, often with debilitating, sometimes deadly, consequences.

In the circumstances, should Prime Minister Holness contract the virus, it could be disruptive, and gravely consequential, to the functioning of the Government. Further, the apparatus of the Government and State would be severely undermined if several ministers were, simultaneously, to become seriously ill. Matters would get worse, and the legitimacy of the State threatened if the illness so ravaged the legislature that no, or few members were left from which to choose a future prime minister or Cabinet members, if the existing ones became incapacitated – or worse.

The larger point is, a decision to vaccinate the country’s leaders, including legislators, and the official symbol of the country’s sovereignty, the governor general, transcends partisan politics.

The empathy that those in office believe they should have for people over whom they govern, supposedly standing with them in the crisis, or the advantage they fear they will cede to their opponents by accepting offer of protection, is of little value in the context of the larger issue – the protection of the State and its capacity to make laws and to deliver agreed services. If that is not possible, the State could collapse and chaos might reign until a replacement is fashioned and is in place.