By: Spokesman Newsroom
BASSETERRE, St. Kitts (Friday 3rd June 2022) — “What happened to the nurses, the cleaners, the cooks who had to confront people with a virus we knew little about then and there was a lot of fear and anxiety; nothing for them?” Such was a question posed by SKNLP Leader Dr. Terrance Drew during an appearance on Freedom FM’s ‘Issues’ programme on Thursday 2nd June 2022. He was speaking on the topic of an honorarium payment to members of the National COVID-19 Task Force totalling over $60,000 collectively, which became a public hot topic stemming from a photo circulating on social media showing twenty names.
Senator Wendy Phipps had addressed the topic on 1st June during a cabinet press conference, defending the payments: “The task force for COVID-19 is a task force that has provided stellar service to the country. Every single member state in CARICOM looked to our model and copied it because we had what can be considered the best build out of a COVID response through the length and breadth of CARICOM. The data also supports the type of yeoman’s service that would have been extended, keeping our rates of deaths very low; up to now we only had 43 deaths. Nobody when they joined the task force did it for what they could get out of it; it was national service.” Phipps informed that the honorarium was part of cabinet submission #236 of 2021, drafted around 6th December 2021 following almost two months of discussion in cabinet and the Ministry of Finance.
Dr. Drew challenged the selectivity of the payments: “I am saying to myself, I remember when I said that all doctors should get some sort of risk pay. You cannot have these people dealing with a new virus then going home to their families and nothing at all. Wendy Phipps is coming and saying this is voluntary, and her pay was the largest. What happened to the nurses, the cleaners, the cooks? The words ‘put country above self’ were used but Wendy was not putting country above self alone — she was getting her big pay. When you look at those thousands upon thousands of dollars they would have gotten and have doctors on PEP during a pandemic, doctors who can’t get a salary, doctors working for less than nurses — that was all a farce.”