Rishard Khan

Re­porter

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

A coali­tion of lo­cal stake­hold­ers, in­clud­ing doc­tors, is call­ing on Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley to re­frain from sign­ing the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion’s (WHO) pro­posed pan­dem­ic ac­cord in its cur­rent form.

The group penned an open let­ter to Row­ley which is pub­lished in eight whole page adds in Thurs­day's Guardian. (See Pages 24 to 31).

It was al­so sent to Pres­i­dent Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo, Min­istry of Health heads and oth­er stake­hold­ers and pol­i­cy-mak­ers.

In all there are nine doc­tors as sig­na­to­ries to the let­ter, three re­li­gious lead­ers, and three labour rep­re­sen­ta­tives. There are al­so 16 civ­il ad­vo­cates in­clud­ing Clarence Men­doza, Ed­ward Mood­ie, Gary Aboud, Robert Amar, and Umar Ab­dul­lah.

The let­ter has al­so been en­dorsed by 14 or­gan­i­sa­tions like the Na­tion­al Trade Union Cen­tre and the Con­cerned Par­ents Move­ment.

The pri­ma­ry au­thor of the let­ter, Dr Ra­jiv Seereer­am, told Guardian Me­dia the group agrees with the in­ten­tion of the agree­ment—a glob­al­ly co­or­di­nat­ed ap­proach to deal­ing with pan­demics. How­ev­er, he said, in its cur­rent form, the ac­cord could do more harm than good.

It’s why, he said, the group asked that the pro­posed amend­ments to the In­ter­na­tion­al Health Reg­u­la­tions (2022) be re­ject­ed be­fore No­vem­ber 2023.

“We have pro­posed very rea­son­able amend­ments which we would like to see for­ward­ed by our lo­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tives or the Prime Min­is­ter for con­sid­er­a­tion by the WHO,” Seereer­am said.

The let­ter al­so called for na­tion­al dis­course on the ac­cord and asked the Prime Min­is­ter to re­spond with­in 30 days to the re­quest for pub­lic con­sul­ta­tions.

The group’s 15-page let­ter point­ed out sec­tions of the draft ac­cord which they be­lieve would vest ad­di­tion­al pow­er to the WHO’s Di­rec­tor-Gen­er­al and through amend­ments to the In­ter­na­tion­al Health Reg­u­la­tions. The group al­so said the treaty will sub­vert the coun­try’s pub­lic health au­ton­o­my to re­spond to glob­al out­breaks.

Guardian Me­dia reached out to the Min­is­ter of Health, Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, for an up­date on T&T’s progress with the ac­cord. How­ev­er, we were di­rect­ed “to the min­istry that li­ais­es with these in­ter­na­tion­al bod­ies.”