Rehman Malik fears coronavirus spread
Islamabad: Chairman Senate Standing Committee on Interior Senator A. Rehman Malik has shown his serious apprehensions that Coronavirus will multiply its victims in Pakistan in the coming weeks and hence nation needs an effective advisory and monitory committee to have SOS control and bring the entire efforts regulated through the proposed committee.
Reinforcing his demand of imposing curfew across the country, he said that nation is witnessing rising toll of confirmed cases therefore the government immediately declare a health emergency in the country .
Senator Rehman Malik advised the government to constitute an independent and high powered ‘Anti-Coronavirus Committee’ consisting of 14 experts that should regulate and monitor the actions and measures of governments both federal and provisional against this deadly virus.
He proposed that the operation of said Anti-Coronavirus Committee (ACVC) may be given a temporary cover through ordinance as the parliament is not in session. He said that he was giving the proposal in his personal capacity and based on his observation of failures of the concerned departments to bring cohesion in actions within the Federal and Provincial governments.Senator A. Rehman Malik expresses that it is unfortunate that instead of countering Coronavirus, Pakistani politics has been infected with corona and blame games and today we see viruslised politics and blame games which must come to end.
He said, “I demand from the Prime Minister Imran Khan that the coronavirus test should be done either by the government or with nominal charges as a common man can not afford Rs 7800 per test adding it is not fair that the state is unable to provide the testing facility to the common man for a pandemic”. He advised that the government should nominate a few of the private laboratories and finance the testing of a common man and it should be on the non-profitably basis”.
He expressed that it is unfair on the part of the government to demoralize the poor masses by showing its inability not to have virus testing of volunteered suspects while it is the moral and constitutional responsibility of the government to provide the testing facility to all suspected for Coronavirus, therefore, the government must enhance its ability of testing of suspected patients.How can the govt claims these figures of nearly 1300 virus victims whereas the government is not testing the suspects that means the number of virus patients are much higher as it looks to be only known cases and the total number of cases out of the population.
He questioned that where is the vision of Parliamentary Committee on Coronavirus and why no meeting of it yet, and was it aimed at ‘filling the blank’ role of Parliament? He further asked why are we taking this mighty virus so lightly whereas our nation and our present & future generations are exposed to high risk.
He said “Kindly do not depend on donations but shut few developing projects and divert these funds to fight against the Coronavirus”. He said that government should avoid loan from IMF and World Bank as they will force this loan for repayments adding it is time to utilise own domestic resources .
