Gail Alexan­der

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley says he’s un­cer­tain what a meet­ing with the Op­po­si­tion leader will do, since the last ad­vice he got from her was to “go to hell.”

“...And I have no in­ten­tion of go­ing there. I have to look af­ter the coun­try,” Row­ley added dur­ing yes­ter­day’s TTT morn­ing show.

He said the Op­po­si­tion leader’s ad­vice had come at a UNC Mon­day Night fo­rum.

Row­ley was re­spond­ing to a caller who’d sug­gest­ed a meet­ing with Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, with me­dia present.

Row­ley said he didn’t think the UNC was tak­ing the pan­dem­ic se­ri­ous­ly, since they were on­ly seek­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties to score po­lit­i­cal points, spread­ing mis­in­for­ma­tion, mak­ing the job “far more dif­fi­cult” and un­der­min­ing Gov­ern­ment’s work.

He trashed Op­po­si­tion MP Dr Roodal Mooni­lal’s ref­er­ence to “guinea pigs” (on Sinopharm vac­cines) as “out­right scan­dalous.”

Row­ley said he’d spo­ken to Cari­com col­leagues and this wasn’t oc­cur­ring.

He said he lis­tened to Op­po­si­tion rec­om­men­da­tions—from ap­peals not to close bars to sun­light killing COVID—and spoke with them in Par­lia­ment. But he said their job was to cre­ate loss of con­fi­dence in Gov­ern­ment.

“And the amount of lies! Every day is a new lie,” he said.

Row­ley said while it was claimed 50,000 peo­ple went to To­ba­go for East­er, it must be seen as peo­ple trav­el­ling both ways, adding that if 25,000 were in­volved one way, there would be 25,000 re­turn­ing.

He said at nor­mal times, there are usu­al­ly 15,000 to 20,000 trav­el­ling and the ad­di­tion­al fig­ure was about 5,000.

“(UNC’s) de­lib­er­ate­ly try­ing to mis­lead the pop­u­la­tion. We spend a lot of time that could be used for oth­er things try­ing to un­do the lies. That’s most dif­fi­cult to man­age in a pan­dem­ic—a lot of mis­in­for­ma­tion and lies.”

On why peo­ple are re­spond­ing neg­a­tive­ly to Gov­ern­ment’s mes­sag­ing, Row­ley said, “That’s a good ques­tion.”

He, how­ev­er, not­ed Op­po­si­tion claims that he’d called for peo­ple to go to To­ba­go and peo­ple went.

Row­ley al­so said there had been a “fair” amount of com­plaints on get­ting replies at vac­cine ap­point­ment num­bers and it was hoped there would be a switch to al­low peo­ple to make reser­va­tions. He said peo­ple with co­mor­bidi­ties as dis­abil­i­ty can be vac­ci­nat­ed im­me­di­ate­ly and the Re­cov­ery Roadmap’s sug­ges­tions, which in­clude the grant re­lief plan, are be­ing used.