POLITICAL instability and a weak political will to push forward health decisions are among reasons for the government’s failure in handling the Covid-19 pandemic, said former health minister Dr S. Subramaniam.

He said blame for failing to effectively curb the spread of the virus should not be pinned squarely on director-general of health Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, but should go to the executives of the ministry – minister Adham Baba and deputy ministers, Dr Noor Azmi Ghazali and Aaron Ago Dagang.

“They should have been steadfast in the recommendations of the ministry and protected the health concerns that might have been raised by the technical people within the ministry itself.

“In that situation, it’s not fair to ask the technical people who are under the leadership of the director-general to fight against the political leadership, which is not possible. 

“There was a weak link there that did not allow the health advisers to actually supersede or override the political decisions. I think that was the problem,” he told The Malaysian Insight.

Yesterday, former director-general Dr Mohamed Ismail Merican branded Noor Hisham a “toothless tiger” for not putting his foot down on certain health decisions and not capitulating to politicians who wanted to make populist decisions.

The former MIC president said that in terms of allowing people to travel interstate during Hari Raya, the opening of Ramadan bazaars and night markets when cases were spiking was a decision made by the government as it was in two minds on whether to lock down or remain open.

“The health intentions and the subsequent decisions (political) made by the government conflict with each other. This conflict led to an increase in the number of cases and the consequences of that is what we are facing now.

“I’m quite confident that those people from MoH, particularly from the technical and public health side, would have made the right decisions and given the right advice.

“Whether they were able to carry this advice through to the political leadership, that is something I’m not very certain of and I believe they probably were not able to do it effectively and that inability probably ended up in some decisions that were not consistent with what would have been ministry’s stand,” he said.

Noor Hisham on Saturday warned people against social visits during Hari Raya Aidiladha tomorrow, adding that visiting and social activities during the Aidilfitri and Gawai celebrations contributed to 267 community clusters in the last two weeks.

“In the excitement to celebrate Hari Raya Korban, don’t ‘sacrifice’ yourself and be the victim of Covid-19,” he said.

While he agreed that the first lockdown in March last year was successful in bringing down the numbers, Subramaniam said subsequent lockdowns were however not done effectively.

“The first lockdown was managed beautifully. Malaysians were prepared and the leadership was very determined.

“If people say why the cases did not come down with this lockdown, the answer is that lockdowns were not done effectively. Because of the way it was done, unnecessarily, we did not see a reduction in the number of cases we would have seen (otherwise).

“Of course prolonged lockdowns will be detrimental to the economy and everybody knows that.

“So what is the balance between this? The balance would have been short phases of very effective lockdown and once you bring down the cases to open the economy,” he said.

Over the past 16 months, Malaysia has implemented three lockdowns in an effort to bring down the number of infections in the country.

The most recent lockdown on June 1 however failed to bring down the numbers and the country has been reporting five-digit cases.

There are now more than 900,000 cases in the country with 10,710 new infections reported yesterday.

The former minister was however certain that a silver lining is in the horizon as the vaccination rate in the country continues to go up.

“Along this period, these were the unfortunate mistakes made, where we were not able to control the cases in the way we could have done in the first phase. At this juncture it’s not the best time to point fingers and accuse any one particular person.

“Fortunately of course, the vaccines arrived and we started vaccinating and now as the number of vaccinations are increasing there is a silver lining in the future.

“I foresee in the next one or two months we can see a reduction in cases and the stress on the health system might become lower.”

To date, 9.57 million or 40.9% of the population have been partially vaccinated with one dose while 18.9% or 4.43 million people have been fully immunised with two doses. – July 19, 2021.