Book review by Allen Fernando As Jamaica’s health minister, Christopher Tufton was guaranteed the prized seat from which not only to observe, but to marshal the island’s battles in the global war against the COVID-19 pandemic For three years – from even before Patient Zero stepped off an aircraft from London at Kingston’s Norman Manley airport on March 4, 2020, until his final notable report on the matter, days before the WHO formally removed virus as a global emergency – Tufton lived the crisis. And a critical face of his country’s response to it. Fortuitously for history, and for anyone who wants to be reminded of some of the granular details of this event, Tufton had the presence of mind to keep a daily journal of the development of the crisis and his personal and government’s policy responses to it.
The result is a highly readable, relevant and useful, even if cornily titled, memoir, Wild Flavours. Tufton’s interpretation of events are, as expected, framed in, and coloured by, his politics and personal perspectives. So, Christopher Tufton emerges as something of a bruised hero.
But that does not diminish the value of the memoir, especially for some of the insights it offers into the tensions that often arise between policy goals between various arms of government. LOOMED LARGE In Tufton’s case, it loomed large in his efforts to prevent the importation and the spread of the disease via the tourism industry, and in his tug-of-war with the tourism minister,.
