Insight into the battles against COVID-19

Book review by Allen Fernando

As Jamaica’s health minister, Christopher Tufton was guaranteed the prized seat from which not only to observe, but to marshal the island’s battles in the global war against the COVID-19 pandemic

For three years – from even before Patient Zero stepped off an aircraft from London at Kingston’s Norman Manley airport on March 4, 2020, until his final notable report on the matter, days before the WHO formally removed virus as a global emergency – Tufton lived the crisis. And a critical face of his country’s response to it.

Fortuitously for history, and for anyone who wants to be reminded of some of the granular details of this event, Tufton had the presence of mind to keep a daily journal of the development of the crisis and his personal and government’s policy responses to it. The result is a highly readable, relevant and useful, even if cornily titled, memoir, Wild Flavours.

Tufton’s interpretation of events are, as expected, framed in, and coloured by, his politics and personal perspectives. So, Christopher Tufton emerges as something of a bruised hero.

But that does not diminish the value of the memoir, especially for some of the insights it offers into the tensions that often arise between policy goals between various arms of government.

LOOMED LARGE

In Tufton’s case, it loomed large in his efforts to prevent the importation and the spread of the disease via the tourism industry, and in his tug-of-war with the tourism minister, Edmund Bartlett, and other tourism interests.

The cruise travel sector’s attempt to undermine and overthrow those efforts, as relayed by Tufton, is telling. His recounting of meetings with some of the cruise lines’ top executives in Miami offers an insight into their hubris and vulgar exercise of economic muscle against small countries, whose representatives they are inclined to treat as subordinates.

Tufton also offers glimpses into the tension that arose between the health ministry (Tufton) and others in the government (for which we can perhaps read Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who was keen to keep the economy as open as possible) over shut-down days championed by the health authorities.

It is unusual in the Caribbean for a practising politician, especially one who remains a member of a government, to write with such relative, even though often veiled, candour about issues within their administrations.

Even if for that alone, Tufton has done an act of service to the region. At the same time, his cataloguing, and interpretation of, Jamaica’s management of the pandemic is a useful addition, without an academic immersion into data, to the body of global literature about COVID-19.