The Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, in a government act with the military, on March 25 in Caracas. MIRAFLORES / EFE / MIRAFLORES
Nicolás Maduro has accumulated in a pandemic year calls for attention for violating the policies of restricting false content and disinformation that most social media platforms have.
His Facebook page, which has been frozen for a month, is a space that the president added to the trench of Chavista communication.
In Venezuela, more than 115 media outlets have closed in the last years of their government.
During the pandemic, according to data from organizations such as the Press and Society Institute (IPYS) and Espacio Público, the control of information and censorship by the authorities has increased.
And in a report titled
The Censorship Virus,
presented by IPYS this March, 25 blockades of digital media are collected during 2020 as well as the increase in arrests of journalists, among 374 cases of violations of freedom of expression and information.
The management and communication of the pandemic has been concentrated in the political apparatus of Chavismo, leaving aside technical and scientific voices.
While the control over information increases, on the television platform of the national networks, almost daily Maduro has placed himself in an expert role and has spoken as a doctor and scientist, launching a series of inventions that range from miracle cures to the covid-19 to conspiracy theories about its spread.
"A weapon of war"
Before the covid became a pandemic and seemed very distant in Latin America, Maduro championed the thesis that the virus found in the Wuhan market was a “weapon of war” against China.
"There are many analyzes in the world since they show that the coronavirus can be a strain created for the biological war against China," it said in February 2020. "There are already many elements that are seen in the global analysis and we must raise the voice, draw attention and ring the bell, alert that the coronavirus is not a weapon of war that is being used against China and now against the peoples of the world in general ”.
Herbs, lemon and ginger
Last March, when there were not even 100 cases of covid in Venezuela, according to official data, Maduro announced a supposed cure for covid-19 in the findings of the supposed Venezuelan scientist Sirio Quintero.
An herbal concoction of malojillo, elderberry, lemon and ginger would cure the disease, as the supposed scientist would have already experienced with cancer.
Maduro called him a "doctor" although he does not have accredited medical studies and invited him to Miraflores.
The references about Quintero are in
Aporrea
, the Chavista-style portal where he is a regular columnist.
He claims to have studies in Philosophy of Sciences in Italy and Germany and applied nanotechnology to biomedicine and toxicology in German and Russian academies.
In addition, he is said to be the inventor of the "bioelectromedicine protocol" and "human reconstitutive wave genetics".
A tweet that disseminated the recipe for the concoction and some articles by Quintero in which he assures that the coronavirus is an "intracellular parasite" designed "by the imperial power" as a bioterrorist weapon was deleted by Twitter.
This was the first yellow card for Maduro's irrepressible speech.
Chlorine, ozone therapy and homeopathic drops
Without the fervor of Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump, even in the political antipodes, Maduro joined those leaders in the defense of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine - drugs for malaria and lupus - as treatment for the treatment of covid, despite to which it has been shown that it is not beneficial.
The drug was incorporated into a treatment kit, along with others without evidence of effectiveness for such as ivermectin, which has been distributed in isolation shelters for suspects and asymptomatic patients who have also been treated with medicines, against international recommendations.
Maduro has also promoted - to the point of incorporating them into the treatment schemes of the Ministry of Health - the use of other experimental therapies without sufficient scientific evidence in the case of covid, such as interferon alfa 2b developed by Cuba, the plasma of convalescent people from covid 19, some Cuban homeopathic drops, ozone therapy and natural medicine.
"The Colombian virus"
Maduro has put forward hypotheses about the spread of the virus that have more to do with his political positions than with epidemiology.
The return of Venezuelan migrants to the country during the first months of the pandemic - some 160,000 in all of 2020, according to the United Nations Office of Humanitarian Affairs - was cataloged by the Venezuelan president as the cause of the expansion of infections in the country .
“We have the Colombian virus attack that Iván Duque sends with the truck drivers.
No country in the world is subjected to an invasion of the virus from another country, ”he said in July.
He assured that the migrants were "biological weapons."
"Cancels the coronavirus 100%"
On October 25, 2020, Maduro affirmed that Venezuelan scientists found a molecule called DR-10, capable of “annihilating” the coronavirus.
"Venezuela has achieved a medicine that cancels 100% the coronavirus," he said in a transmission on social networks where he showed a kind of vial with a yellow liquid that would be the molecule.
Without presenting any scientific support, he said that he had started the certification process before the World Health Organization (MNS) to "ratify the results obtained by the IVIC."
The active ingredient in the molecule is a derivative of ursolic acid from a plant, which is not toxic to humans, which has been tested on hepatitis B, human papillomavirus and Ebola and in in vitro laboratory tests at the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Investigations for SARS-CoV-2.
The miraculous goths
The latest medicine that Maduro has promoted for the coronavirus has turned it into a miracle: carvativir, better known in Venezuela as the miraculous drops of Doctor José Gregorio Hernández, a name that the president himself put in honor of the well-known 19th century doctor who aspires to a position in the Catholic saints.
It is a thyme-based product that, according to Maduro, "neutralizes virus cells."
It has begun to distribute it throughout the country and has said that it will be sold in pharmacies, as it ensures that all pharmacological, health, biological and molecular procedures have been complied with.
“It can be used as a prophylactic, to strengthen health and immunity;
it is used curatively as a therapeutic, for all cases: asymptomatic coronavirus, with mild, moderate, severe and very serious symptoms;
and also post-covid ”.
He has said that it was developed in the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research, however, the assembly of researchers of the institution issued a statement in which they assured that they were unaware of these studies.
