Peaceful protest over plan to give MoH more power
ABOUT 15 people with placards gathered outside the States yesterday to protest against permanent powers being given to the island’s medical officer of health.
Peaceful protesters spoke with politicians, and handed out information on death statistics.
Their placards read ‘no permanent powers for unelected medical officer of health’ and ‘two years to flatten the curve is not a state of emergency, it is a dictatorship’.
The States is due to vote today on the recommendation that proposals should be drawn up to give the medical officer of health enduring powers to impose restrictions or requirements on people infected with Covid or other notifiable diseases.
Such a move will give Dr Nicola Brink, and her successors, greater powers when the Civil Contingencies Authority is disbanded.
John Ford was one of the protesters. He said far-reaching powers should not be given to an unelected individual.
‘The powers should never be held by one individual, I think the powers should be held by a committee of people.
‘When you have a committee to run an organisation or a board of directors, there’s always a democracy so people have to discuss and vote on things.
‘One person should never have so much power, if you look at the legal statutes that they have done, they have given her so much power she can almost involve the police in things, and I don’t think that’s right. This is 2022, we should be having libertarian policies of freedom of movement.
‘If people look at the statistics they will see that there is no proof in 2020 and 2021 of a deadly lethal viral epidemic.’
Mr Ford said death statistics from the Greffe showed that there were more deaths in 2012, 2016 and 2017 than in the two pandemic years.
During debate Deputy Heidi Soulsby, an adviser to the Civil Contingencies Authority, referred to the protesters’ statistics and interpreted them differently.
‘They had done some research which was actually interesting because it showed how the number of deaths each year had gone up and down, and I could say “I know it was high in that year because I know we had a high flu season”.
‘But they implied that because there were no excess deaths from the figures that meant we had over-reacted, but I would have thought that was an example of success at the measures we’ve had that we’ve kept the death rates down.’
