So, what does the Minister of Health and Wellness have to say about all this righteous blowback from the health establishment?
It's his government which has said from the outset that they follow the best advice of the technicians.
But now the technicians are waving a red flag, warning government that it's going off course. We asked the Minister of health about it when we caught up with him at this morning's installation. He says that this limited re-opening is a move that the country is equipped to handle.
Hon. Michel Chebat - Minister of Health "Cabinet made a decision to open our land borders. We're going to be opening the north, and the west, and the south, and the San Pedro as well but it's gonna be a phased opening in the initial stages, it's just going to be opening. In the initial stages, it's just gonna be opened for tourists wanting to come into the country and I can tell you that this has been a joint effort of the Ministry of immigration, Ministry of Tourism, and Ministry of health making sure that we have the correct protocols in place and to try, to continue safeguarding the citizenry of Belize. We feel that we have sufficient safeguard within our country, and we're going to have sufficient safeguards at our borders to try to stem and to keep away as much of that as we can."
Cherisse Halsall "This morning on social media the alarm was raised by none other than Mark Musa who is the husband of the former acting DHS. Is there concern that someone so close to a health official would be voicing this much concern over that move?"
Hon. Michel Chebat "Listen, we've always said and I can tell you that Dr. Musa is a part of the COVID task force that advises the ministry of health and in turn the government and we are not blind to his admonitions and his warnings, however, we feel that in the greater picture that this is something we can handle. I assure you that if at any point we see the numbers rising to an unmanageable level we are going to take drastic action. Please remember that we've had 14 months, 15 months where the tourism sector has been completely demolished and annihilated if you want to use the word, and there are 100s of thousands of people who are involved with this part of the economy, and it is important to gradually open back up and to give people a chance to get back to work and to give our economy a chance. You know that we've had great successes and we want to keep it that way but it means that we all have to be vigilant."
We also asked the Minister if fully vaccinated Belizeans are anywhere near being able to ditch the masks, but he told us that until the country achieves 70% herd immunity via vaccination, masks are here to stay.
