The Government is standing by Health and Wellness Minister Dr Christopher Tufton, amid calls for his resignation in the wake of revelations of the deaths of more than a dozen babies as a result of an outbreak of the klebsiella pneumoniae bacteria at the Victoria Jubilee Hospital (VJH) in downtown Kingston.

Addressing yesterday’s (November 2) post-Cabinet press briefing at Jamaica House in St Andrew, Robert Morgan, minister without portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister with responsibility for information, said Cabinet received a “very detailed report” from Tufton on Monday and that Prime Minister Andrew Holness had been informed on the matter the previous Wednesday.

“In listening to the report from the minister, listening to all the facts that have come forward, the system worked,” said Morgan.

“What has happened here is that, immediately as it was found out there was a challenge, there was a cauterisation.”

The de facto information minister argued that this cauterisation could be seen in the fact that, during the first month of the outbreak, there were about seven deaths of babies while, in the second month, there were about two deaths and in the third month there was just one.

Overall, there have been 13 deaths officially attributed to klebsiella since the outbreak, with the first deaths occuring in July.

Since the issue came to public attention last week, the People’s National Party (PNP) has demanded Tufton’s immediate resignation and called for a comprehensive probe into the deaths of the newborns, which the Opposition estimated as accounting for 43 per cent of the neonates in the nursery at the VJH. 

As part of its argument, the Opposition noted that Dr Fenton Ferguson, then minister of health under a PNP administration, was n 2015 forced to step aside amid the so-called ‘dead babies scandal’ in which approximately 19 newborns died from exposure to klebsiella.

But yesterday, Morgan indicated that the Cabinet has dismissed the calls for Tufton to be booted, declaring: “We have very full confidence in Minister Tufton’s ability to manage the portfolio. He has done a pretty exemplary job in very challenging times, coming through COVID. Also, he has been on a transformational push in terms of improving health facilities. We have to, as a Cabinet, recognise the work of the minister, and recognise the distinction between what happened previously with things like ChikV, with things like the previous challenges with babies succumbing to klebsiella and what happened now.”