The Malta Community Chest Fund spent some €20 million on medicines not in the government formulary, President George Vella told The Malta Independent, adding that he feared that people take the charity’s work somewhat for granted.

Vella made the comments during an interview with The Malta Independent on Sunday, where he also expressed fear that he may have to stay on in his post if the government and opposition fail to reach an agreement on his successor and where he explained the reason he didn’t personally sign a bill on IVF reforms for the first time.

As President, George Vella is the head of the Malta Community Chest Fund – an NGO which does great work for a great many people: work which, however, comes at a certain financial price.

“There was a time when it catered for the needs of those who need to get to the end of the month, but eventually the idea came about that the organisation should start to support people who needed medicines which were not on the government formulary,” Vella said of the work of the MCCF, which is today registered as a foundation and has its own CEO and supervisory bodies.

“Initially, the support was quite small.  In 2015, the money spent on medicines was less than €1 million. In 2018, it had gone up to €8 million.  Last year it was €20 million. Why?  More and more medicines have come into the market but every new product has phenomenally high prices,” he explained.

“What worries me is that many people take it for granted, that the money never ends and it’s a government department – which it isn’t.  It has to survive on funding,” he continued.

He said that these pills do ultimately work, and that they “thankfully” bring results and lead to people living longer.  However, this means that the expenses are always increasing.

“The MCCF has a huge challenge before it,” he said.

President shares how relatives of his old patients called him up at the start of pandemic

One of the seismic events to hit Malta under Vella’s presidency was the Covid-19 pandemic, the first case of which was found in Malta in March 2020.

A medical doctor by trade, Vella was no different to the thousands of others who had worries about what would happen when the pandemic arrived on Maltese shores.

“Without a doubt,” he says when asked whether he was concerned about the impact might have on people’s wellbeing.

“The first psychological shock was when we started seeing coffins in Bergamo, Italy, being put onto military trucks and taken to God knows where.  The first impression you have is obviously: what effect will this have on our country,” he said.

He added that for him one of the things which alarmed him most early on was when he started to receive telephone calls from the relatives of people living at the St Joseph Home for the Elderly in Fgura, many of whom were his old patients.

“You start to question ‘what can I do for them?’ as obviously the government was taking measures, which as it turned out were very legitimate and very in line with science to stop the spread, but at the same time hearing someone say I cannot go see my mother and be near here while she is dying, what do I do?”

He said that while we got through it, “God knows how many people are still heartbroken because their loved ones passed away and they didn’t have the chance to tell them goodbye.”

Vella continued that as a doctor, when he heard of the first case being found in an elderly home, he thought “this was it” and that the virus would spread like wildfire amongst the vulnerable.

“But thankfully there was a lot of cooperation and there were exceptionally skilled people who contributed, and the people trusted them.  The people put their trust in the hands of those who were giving advice and that resulted in us pushing Covid away from our shores as quickly as possible,” he said.

Vella expressed his pride at the fact that Malta was being quoted as an example for how things should be done, although he noted that being a small island made controlling the pandemic easier.

On the mental health aspect, Vella said that it affected everyone’s mental health – be it children whose schooling and learning system was disrupted to the elderly who lived in fear that the virus would affect them, and to everyone else in between.

“But thank God this all passed. One must praise and thank the health authorities and all the staff who were hands on with the patients and did miracles with them,” he concluded.

The first part of the interview can be seen here