Frontliner who lost husband to COVID-19, nominated for European Citizen award

Marilyn Casha, wife of surgeon Aaron Casha, who died from COVID-19, nominated for European Citizen prize

Credit: Courntey Farrugia
Credit: Courntey Farrugia

A Nationalist Party candidate for Europe has nominated Dr Marilyn Casha, the wife of the late Dr Aaron Casha who died last week of COVID-19, for the European Citizen price on behalf of all Maltese COVID-19 front-liners.

Dr Marilyn Casha was nominated by Peter Agius, a former head of the European Parliament office in Malta who now works in the European Parliament.

Agius said the nomination was in the name of “care-workers locked down for weeks in residential homes, pharmacists infected in their duty to provide essential medicines, hundreds of nurses of doctors leaving their households, quarantined or living in isolation and the health department professionals who track down every case to stop contagion.”

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He said that front-liners put the public’s welfare before any other consideration, and were deserving of the “utmost gratitude”.

In his nomination, Agius said that hundreds of professionals were being represented by Marilyn Casha, a front-liner in her own merits, who herself had been infected by COVID-19, as well as the loss of her husband, a surgeon, to the virus.

Agius said that front-liners put their health at risk to help others in the most concrete expression of the value of solidarity and human compassion.

“Health care professionals working on the many fronts of the fight against COVID-19, nurses and doctors in primary to intensive care, from public health managers and contact tracing operatives to care workers in homes and pharmacists have, through their commitment and selflessness, been the expression the values of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, in particular, the universal values of human dignity and solidarity,” he said.

Awarded for the first time in 2008, the European Citizen’s prize recognises projects and initiatives that promote EU values, mutual understanding and facilitate cross-border cooperation. In light of the current exceptional circumstances, citizens and organisations have been encouraged to nominate projects dealing with the fight against COVID-19.