WATCH: MP Recounts How Someone At Mater Dei Tried To Make Her Skip COVID-19 Vaccine Queue
Nationalist MP Claudette Buttigieg has explained in some detail how someone at Mater Dei tried to convince her to take the COVID-19 vaccine prematurely last weekend.
Interviewed on NET Live last night, Buttigieg said she had gone to the hospital to vaccinate her daughter, who is diabetic, and stood in the queue like the hundreds of other people there.
“We spent over an hour in the queue and when the time came to register ourselves, someone asked me if my daughter and I are taking treatment abroad,” she said, confirming that she passed on this man’s name to Health Minister Chris Fearne.
“I asked him what he meant and he told my daughter to register. Someone else then whispered to me that while my daughter is getting vaccinated, I should get vaccinated too. I ignored him and continued queuing up with my daughter.”
However, as they were queuing, the first man who approached her sought Buttigieg and her daughter out again and told her daughter to follow him. Smelling a rat, Buttigieg went with her daughter and told her to do what she tells her.
“The man made me skip everyone in the queue and told me that I’m taking treatment abroad. I told him ‘don’t you dare use my daughter to get to me, we don’t need to skip queues because we’re normal people like everyone else’.”
“As I was walking back to the queue, I could hear people talking about how I refused to skip the line. Had they known that they weren’t only trying to make my daughter jump the queue but were trying to make me get vaccinated too, I think a riot would have broken out.”
“A person of some importance happened to be standing behind me and told me he wouldn’t have believed what happened had he not seen and heard it all himself.”
Health Minister Chris Fearne
Chris Fearne yesterday claimed in Parliament that several PN MPs have asked him to skip the queue to get a COVID-19 vaccine and that one of them even sent him a “gentle reminder”.
All PN MPs have categorically denied this was the case, although Opposition leader Bernard Grech said he intends to verify certain information that Fearne passed to him.
When Buttigieg stood up to ask if he was referring to her, Fearne said he wasn’t but that he knew she had asked him to get vaccinated because her daughter suffers from a condition.
At this point, Buttigieg stood up and accused Fearne of lying, swearing that she never asked him if she or her daughter could get vaccinated.
“I solemnly swear that what Fearne said is a bare-faced lie,” Buttigieg said on NET Live. “In fact, after the sitting Fearne told MPs outside the House that I was right. He admitted in front of my colleagues that it’s not true I had asked him for a vaccine.”
“I told him I had no reason to ask him for the vaccine because my daughter was at the hospital to get vaccinated.”
What do you make of Buttigieg’s account?
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