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Papayas & goats catch corona? Tanzanian president shows tests are worthless

Tanzanian President John Magufuli verified his doubts about corona lab tests by sending samples from a papaya and a goat that came back positive for coronavirus.

By World Israel News Staff

Tanzania’s President John Magufuli is known for being a bit of a coronavirus skeptic and took his doubts to a new level by secretly sending non-human samples to a lab for testing, Israel Hayom reported this week.

The tests came back positive.

Magufuli wanted to know if the coronavirus testing kits that had been imported were returning accurate results, so he arranged to have several samples sent to the laboratory doing the COVID-19 tests for Tanzania, giving fake names and ages for the swabs that were actually taken from a papaya,  a goat and a sheep, the report said.

Magufuli said the papaya and goat both tested positive for the virus, confirming his doubts about the test kits. As of Monday the website nCoV2019.live showed the country of 59 million people had 509 confirmed infections and 21 deaths from coronavirus.

“Something stinks in all these tests when you send a papaya test and it comes back positive. So, what, all the papayas have to be quarantined?” Mugafali said.

The president said he also arranged to have samples from motor oil and blood from an indigenous bird tested and the results returned either positive or negative without any logic at all.

“A healthy person may have a false positive result for corona and he will die of fear and not of corona'” Magufuli said. “I say to all the people of Tanzania, Africa and the whole world, the flu has always been here. The papaya and goats are sick with corona and they are thriving. I believe something very strange is happening all over the world.”

The Tanzanian leader had initially refused to impose strong closures on his country and urged the public to pray in churches and mosques to help end the pandemic.

The director of Africa’s Centers for Disease Control located in Ethiopia rejected Magufuli’s claims that the test kits were faulty, Reuters reported.

“The tests that Tanzania is using, we know they are working very well,” John Nkengasong said.