President Of Tanzania Says “Something Is Happening” After Exposing Fake Coronavirus Test Kits

The President of Tanzania, John Magufuli, seems to have outsmarted the manufacturers of Coronavirus test kits by having some papaya, quail, goat, sheep, and some motor oil tested for the virus. When the results came in, they tested positive for COVID-19. He has since called on the authorities to investigate “sabotage” at the national laboratory.

From Reuters:

The president said he had instructed Tanzanian security forces to check the quality of the kits. They had randomly obtained several non-human samples, including from a pawpaw, a goat and a sheep, but had assigned them human names and ages. These samples were then submitted to Tanzania’s laboratory to test for the coronavirus, with the lab technicians left deliberately unaware of their origins. Samples from the pawpaw and the goat tested positive for COVID-19, the president said, adding this meant it was likely that some people were being tested positive when in fact they were not infected by the coronavirus. “There is something happening. I said before we should not accept that every aid is meant to be good for this nation,”

Besides not trusting the imported kits, President Magufuli doesn’t even trust the technicians at his own national laboratory, suggesting they can be bought off to produce fake results. It’s worth noting that Tanzania is one of the 47 countries in the World Health Organization.

From StraitTimes:

“The equipment or people may be compromised and sometimes it can be sabotage…,” Mr Magufuli said in a Swahili speech broadcast live through state-run TBC. He said he had secretly had a variety of animals, fruits and vehicle oil tested at the laboratory. According to Mr Magufuli, a papaya, a quail and a goat tested positive and he suspects a “dirty game” in the laboratory. “That means there is possibility for technical errors or these imported reagents have issues. Probably, the technicians are also bought to mislead.“

A day after the President called for an investigation, the director of Tanzania’s national laboratory along with its quality assurance manager had been suspended.

He’s not wrong when he said “something is happening”.