Profiting from a national health crisis must be condemned

 

The latest news report on a live-streamed dialogue session on the Facebook page of Anwar Ibrahim is extremely worrying.

The dialogue where former deputy prime minister Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail and former health minister Dzulkefly Ahmad were also present, saw Anwar raise a very serious allegation - one that was also in the social media mill earlier.

He said, “When it concerns the people, even the question of public health becomes a means to make profits. What kind of people are they?”

This is beyond human decency. In fact to even say that it is an atrocity is just putting it mildly.

How could the democratically unelected government of the day even think of making a tidy profit from the life-saving vaccine that is desperately needed by Malaysians as much as the world?

Where is the categorical and fundamentally moral and ethical imperative that demands its foremost duty to the citizenry in times of a national crisis affecting the health and well-being of an entire population?

And it seems that this issue about some party/parties looking at profit-making in the securing of the Covid-19 vaccine was "even raised by those within the Perikatan Nasional fold, including some from Umno".

No small wonder that the social media was already whispering about this matter that we could very likely be led to believe as fake news by those with a vested interest.

Surely MPs - with one of them who is a PM potential in the eyes of millions of citizens no doubt - would dare not make such a blatant, fraudulent claim in public if they did not have the facts.

Hence, citizens must demand that the government comes clean now.

Investigators do not have to wait for an official complaint to swing into action as this involves national security.

Imagine, what if the secretive agenda to make a killing eventually directly explains the delay in securing the vaccine and led to more Covid-19 victims succumbing to death?

This is just too much. It is horrifying. More preposterous than the further fall in the recent national corruption ranking.

The entire nation of leaders, politicians, policymakers and right-thinking citizens including religious heads are duty-bound to demand transparency and full accountability over this delay in securing the Covid-19 vaccine compared to so many other nations in the region who have beaten Malaysia to it.

Did leaders put profits before saving lives?

If even this most critical and paramount government decision is laced with corrupt priorities, and if allowed to go under the carpet like many other things in the past, then all of us would have been traitors to nationhood.

We need honest answers honourable prime minister of Malaysia. - Mkini

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The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor, JD Lovrenciear and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.