“This is not the plague”, Robert Abela announced on the morning of March 8, when the first case of COVID-19 in Malta had just been reported.
Only hours earlier, Abela had authorised the cruise liner MSC Opera to dock. The ship had carried a confirmed case of the virus just days earlier. The advice of many was to deny the ship entry. But it took the threat of industrial action by the doctors’ and nurses’ unions for the prime minister to grudgingly relent.
The childishly petulant government statement that followed beggared belief. “Following public alarm raised by misleading information given by a local media outlet through a story riddled with partial truths and erroneous details” the government had agreed with the ship operators to reroute the ship.
By then, the number of infected cases in northern Italy had multiplied. The deaths were increasing too. But in his Sunday morning “plague” sermon, Abela failed to heed the advice of his health minister to stop flights from the red zone of northern Italy.
Against expert advice, Abela decided he would take the responsibility of maintaining air links with the European epicentre of the infection. He stated: “Rest assured, there will come a time when you’ll say I was right.” He wasn’t. Amateurism in health is fatal as Chris Fearne, the experienced surgeon, can attest.
Sure enough it took only a few hours for the massive spike in Italian deaths to be reported. Hospitals in an area with some of the best healthcare facilities in Europe were overwhelmed. Access to life-saving ventilators had dried up. Decisions were being made as to who to save and who to leave. Abela was back on our screens. Flights from the area would be cancelled after all.
It seemed the reality check had chastised haughtiness. Yet the same delays occurred with other decisions such as school and university closures, public gathering bans and finally mandatory quarantine.
Abela’s initial trivialisation of the pandemic is eerily reminiscent of a character in Camus’ La Peste. The Prefect, after initially believing that the plague was a false alarm, reluctantly authorised limited measures to combat it after pressure from the medical association. But when this did not work, he tried to avoid responsibility. Only when the cruel finality of the plague became evident did he decide to close the town. By then Oran was decimated and its survivors left depressed, anxious, fearful and mourning their loved ones.
Robert Abela was right – this pandemic is not the plague. It is the repugnant corruption of those who surround him that is the plague
Of course, this pandemic will eventually subside. But Abela will still be left with the pestilence of corruption which his foreign minister admitted to with Tim Sebastian. For it is corruption that has left St Luke’s Hospital a dilapidated unsalvageable ruin.
The €220 million investment Joseph Muscat and Konrad Mizzi promised and the additional hundreds of hospital beds which are now like gold dust never materialised.
They never could have because there never was any money and never any intention to honour any agreement. Muscat recruited a phoney company and then gave its successor numerous concessions to delay due payments and agreed targets.
And now Abela is in the lurch – deprived of desperately needed hospital beds and robbed of the millions we could have used to get them. That is the price of corruption which will become all too clear in the weeks to come.
Instead we have the self-serving, insincere contrition of Evarist Bartolo who voted to keep Mizzi in post. Abela was compelled to terminate the obscene €80,000 contract Mizzi was awarded after his resignation but without pursuing those who had engineered it.
Bartolo’s cringeworthy claims of being a Savonarola are deluded. Savonarola preached boldly against corruption, despotic rule and tyrannical abuse by government and not wrote meek Facebook posts. He suffered savage torture and death, not sought political survival with cryptic messages. Bartolo’s gargantuan cowardice is a stark contrast to his self-perceived epic heroism.
In the interview, he denounced hate speech and online abuse of Daphne Caruana Galizia by Labour supporters, but in parliament sits next to Glenn Bedingfield, the unrepentant prime abuser and the man rewarded with the party whip. He criticised the daily clear-out of the Caruana Galizia memorial but in cabinet sits next to the man who orchestrated it and was found guilty of breaching human rights, now regaled with the education portfolio.
In parliament, he also sits next to Muscat and Mizzi – the two culprits responsible for the ill-preparedness of our country for the oncoming onslaught.
Yet, he did not even have the courage to name them in his insipid interview. Muscat and Mizzi, with others who like Bartolo remained silent, are responsible for the wreckage that is St Luke’s and the disappearance of millions of euros. And Muscat brazenly lobbies for more taxpayers’ money to be passed on to Armin Ernst – money we now desperately need for more hospital beds, ventilators and healthcare personnel.
Abela cannot overcome this plague while allowing infected colleagues to sit so close to him in parliament and in cabinet. No quarantine will save him. The janitor in La Peste insisted that “There are no rats in the building” as they died around him in droves. Abela was right – this pandemic is not the plague. It is the repugnant corruption of those who surround him that is the plague.
Kevin Cassar is professor of surgery, University of Malta