The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) has called on the Federal Government to call Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State to order over his claims that there were no cases of COVID-19 in the state.
NMA also challenged Kogi State Government to show Nigerians evidence that the state was actually free from COVID-19, rather than downgrading the results released by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) which listed the state among those with confirmed cases.
In a chat with Vanguard Newspaper on Thursday, the President of NMA, Dr. Francis Faduyile said: “The state government should show its own evidence. The people that did the laboratory tests have shown theirs.
“It is expected that the state government should give Nigerians evidence that they have tested hundreds of people and could not find a case of coronavirus.”
Faduyile, who warned that the pandemic was not politics, said: “This problem has nothing to do with politics, because it is science. So it is not about what the state accepts or what they do not accept.
“I call on the Federal Government to call Governor Yahaya Bello to order. We have been talking about this and asking the governor for his understanding.
“We don’t live in a world which one man rules. We live in a world where we are governed by scientific evidence. There is something we call reproducibility. If he is not convinced, let us reproduce it again. But not on the state government’s terms. Let us take the samples and do it again.
“We want the Federal Government to ensure that the right thing is done.”
He appealed to medical doctors and other health workers in to continue to follow the normal protocol of seeing patients and treating patients.
