Gov’t evasive about source of $1.6m to boost COVID vaccine uptake 

Despite comments from Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves and the government’s lead attorney in the “Vaccine Mandate Case”, Vincentians are no closer to knowing the “Friendly Government Source” that gave US$600,000 (EC$1.6m) to boost COVID-19 vaccination rates in the country in 2021, when the government ordered public sector workers to take a jab or lost their jobs. 

The information was disclosed to the public in the dissenting judgement of Justice Appeal Gerhard Wallbank on Wednesday, even as his colleagues, Justices of Appeal Eddy Ventose and Paul Webster, held that the government did not act illegally in implementing and enforcing the mandate.

Dominican senior counsel Anthony Astpahan, the government’s lead attorney in the case and Gonsalves both deferred to each other while fielding questions about the issue separately and jointly on WE FM on Sunday. 

“There is zero relevance. It was never an issue before the High Court judge, nor was it an issue during the hearing of the Court of Appeal,” Astaphan said.

He appeared to begin to question Wallbank’s inclusion of the issue in the judgment.

“Why that judge in particular — let me tell you this: Justice Ventose and Justice Webster are lawyers that have been on the court for many a year and have great and considerable experience in constitutional matters,” Astaphan said.

“Judge Wallbank — who I’m not criticising as a judge — does not have the level of experience in constitutional matters they have. And why he would want to raise the funding for the COVID campaign and for the COVID educational process that the chief medical officer in good faith ordered to happen, and for the purchase of the vaccines left me bewildered. I just couldn’t possibly — I don’t know whether the intention was to raise the spectrum of a motive,” Astaphan said.  

He said his legal team had to “put in certain evidence to show that the government had in fact raised the money for the educational programme, to raise the rate of vaccination”.

Astaphan said SVG had one of the lowest rates of vaccination in the Caribbean.

However, he did not mention, as Wallbank pointed out in his dissenting judgment, that the country also had one of the lowest infection rates. 

The lawyer said that the government had raised money to buy, distribute, store and preserve the integrity of the vaccines in special containers. 

“So it cost a lot of money,” he said, adding that the government’s legal team “put the information of the figures out to show that it was not just idle talk on the part of the Chief Medical Officer, but the executive and legislative branch were, in fact supporting the measures to educate people about the vaccine”. 

Astapahan said a number of people he knows to be “anti-government have focused on these paragraphs, creating some kind of suspicion and motive”.

Speaking on the same programme, Gonsalves was asked about the funds from the unnamed “Friendly Government Source”. 

He dismissed it as “a completely irrelevant piece of background information. 

“And Tony could comment on that, because everything which we have spoken about — I don’t know what the affidavit said. The affidavits probably put from our side, detail something and say from other friendly sources,” said Gonsalves, who is also a lawyer.

“Nothing turns on that,” he said, adding that the government disclosed to Parliament the source of the money for COVID-19 vaccines.

He said his government received vaccines through the World Health Organization, Caribbean Development Bank, Mustique Charitable Trust, India, and Russia. 

“And I made the point that we had gotten a contribution from someone who had been in Mustique but who lived in Canouan. I don’t even know if that Canadian is a Vincentian,” he said.

The prime minister further said that his government received about US$300,000 from “another person from Canada or the UK who lives in Bequia”, which it used to buy vaccines.

“… but they didn’t want their name to be called. And I said all these things publicly, but I don’t know, I see some anti-vaxxers are taking that point as some kind of an issue, … where the — all the resources which we used came from legitimate, open, transparent sources, and they were all made known to the country and to the Parliament,” Gonsalves said.

“I don’t know what point is sought to be made on that background piece of information provided by the dissenting opinion of Justice Wallbank. But that information would have come, I believe, Tony, from one of the affidavits. I didn’t study the affidavits which you guys put in.”

Astaphan responded, “That’s correct. I think we put it …”

Meanwhile, in his dissenting judgment, Justice Wallbank noted that in 2021, the government allocated US$1,369,380 to its vaccination roll-out campaign. 

Of this, US$234,380 was budgeted to come from the Government’s funding; US$460,000 from external sources, including US$ 410,000 from an unnamed “Friendly Government Source”, and the balance of US$789,380 was to be financed further. 

The Government disclosed its “strategy to address the gap of $789,380.00” as including raising a bank loan of US$100,000, a payment of US$368,000 from the Mustique Charitable Trust, a payment of US$200,000 by way of an “Alba Grant” and a further US$600,000 from a “Friendly Government Source”, the identity of which was also withheld, Wallbank noted.

“The terms and conditions for the various financing sources, including in respect of funds supplied by foreign ‘Friendly Government Sources’, were not put in evidence,” Wallbank noted in his dissenting opinion.