On 7 January, 2020 the WHO Regional Office for Europe held a press conference, in the course of which WHO Regional Director for Europe Hans Kluge and other WHO experts responded to journalists’ questions about the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Central Asia editor for the news outlet Eurasianet Peter Leonard asked why WHO experts has not visited Turkmenistan so far to scale up testing and send samples to WHO reference laboratories despite the agreement reached with the Turkmen authorities in early August 2020 and whether the time has come for WHO to finally call Turkmenistan out on its continued adherence to its clear and dangerous misinformation about COVID-19.
Kluge said that Turkmenistan has not reported any confirmed COVID-19 cases and pointed out that following the WHO mission in July the authorities did put in place a comprehensive set of measures to interrupt transmission of acute respiratory infections in the community, including measures related to mass gatherings, markets and public transport.
Kluge also confirmed that during negotiations bringing together WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the President of Turkmenistan, the Minister of Healthcare and the Minister of Foreign Affairs a decision was made to set up a team to perform joint sampling and then send the samples for quality assurance to WHO reference laboratories outside Turkmenistan.
“It is rather unfortunate that as of today, we have not seen any concrete follow-up so far but I would like to assure you that we continue the open dialogue with the government of Turkmenistan including through the country office to follow up on these recommendations”, – the WHO Regional Director for Europe says.The post Hans Kluge fails to say why WHO has not dispatched its mission to Turkmenistan (video) first appeared on Chronicles of Turkmenistan.