On social media in recent days, it has been reported that Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dennis Mukwege has resigned from the leadership of the two COVID-19 working groups in Congo for being directed at manipulating patient numbers.
The text that is shared together with a photo from the doctor reads:
Dr. Denis Mukwege has just resigned from the team responsible for the COVID-19. He states: “I can by no means dirty my Nobel Peace Prize for money, we have been ordered to declare any illness to be coronavirus and any death. In addition, the thing that displeases me is that after more than 100 samples none came out positive.”
The claim that is spreading virally is speculation. Mukwege rejected the quotes attributed to him in the viral posts that are spread through social networks.
Mukwege receives the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize along with Nadia Murad. On March 30, 2020, he was appointed president and vice president of two working groups fighting the pandemic of COVID-19 in the province of South Kivu.
On June 10, he submitted his resignation together with a statement where he accuses of slow testing, lack of precautionary measures and organizational problems. He did not mention any of the reasons given in the articles that are being spread virally through social networks, such as “money” or manipulating the number of cases.
Dr. Denis Mukwege’s communications person, Maud Salome Ekila, told the global news agency AFP Fact Check that the reports were “fake news”.
“These are not the words of Dr. Dennis Mukwege,” she said on June 18. “It’s amazing that the media and people on the Internet share this false information when we have official accounts where his resignation was explained and justified in a statement.”
Mukwege himself tweeted that the posts were not “original” and posted links to his official social media profiles.
Namely, as reasons for his resignation, Dr. Dennis Mukwege cites two difficulties that have prevented them from effectively applying their strategy:
On the one hand, the impossibility of having in our province of RT ‐ PCR allowing to quickly confirm the diagnosis of COVID +. The time required, of more than two weeks, to receive the results of the samples sent to the INRB in Kinshasa, constituted a major handicap for our strategy based on “testing, identifying, isolating and treating”.
On the other hand, a loosening of prevention measures by our population, a denial of realities, the impossibility of enforcing barrier measures, the porosity of our borders with the massive return of thousands of compatriots from neighboring countries without having been quarantined, decreased the effectiveness of our strategy.
These two factors are added organizational and consistency weaknesses between the different teams responsible for the response to the pandemic in South Kivu.
The manipulative article, which is spreading virally on social media, aims to give the wrong impression of a scenario that will support conspiracy theories according to which there is no COVID-19. All the sick or dead are allegedly falsely counted as victims of coronavirus.
But the pandemic of COVID-19 is, unfortunately, a reality. That is why we need to be more aware and not allow ourselves to be manipulated, but to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Only then will we contribute to the fight against coronavirus.
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This project was funded in part through a U.S. Embassy grant. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the implementers/authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Government.
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