Venezuelan Regime to ‘Investigate’ Scientists Doubting Official Coronavirus Stats

Venezuela’s socialist regime this week announced plans to investigate scientists who have raised doubts about the country’s official infection rate and the death toll from the Chinese coronavirus, which most analysts consider to be abnormally low.

In a report published this month, Venezuela’s Academy of Physical, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences argued that the regime’s figures were inconsistent with the general trend of the pandemic and that the country could see as many as 4,000 cases daily cases as early as next month.

As repeatedly reported by Breitbart News, Venezuela’s official number of coronavirus cases of 445 infections and just ten deaths is astonishingly low, not just given trends in other countries, but also considering the country’s deteriorated socialist healthcare system and the vulnerability of its poverty-stricken population.

Public questioning of the regime’s official figures has caused anger among senior socialist party officials. Socialist Party Vice President and Nicolás Maduro’s right-hand man Diosdado Cabello confirmed his intention to investigate scientists’ findings, as the “numbers that they use are not supported.”

“This needs to be investigated,” he said on his weekly propaganda show, Con el Mazo Dando (Hitting with the Mallet) on Wednesday, adding that there is not a “single piece of evidence” the regime is not properly testing people.

Clearly disturbed by the announcement, the Academy released a statement on Thursday explaining the report’s conclusions that testing should be increased and that efforts to flatten the pandemic’s curve even with a nationwide lockdown are unrealistic.

“It worries us as scientists, that we are harassed and marked for a technical report intended to improve management of the pandemic,” the statement added. “The report used a mathematical model that the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine developed earlier this year.”

The concern was echoed by the Venezuelan National Assembly, the country’s last legitimate federal institution, which denounced the threats against the Academy.

“Providing scientific facts in an unbiased way for the well-being of our people who are suffering the worst crisis in our history, is a heroic act that deserves to be recognized by all Venezuelans,” the Assembly said in a statement.

As noted by Voice of America, Venezuela’s testing system has so far relied on rapid blood tests sent by communist China, which, after initially covering up the virus, has “donated” faulty medical equipment around the world.

Very few of the more reliable tests recommended by the World Health Organization, known as polymerase chain reactions (PCR), have been used due to lack of access. Currently, Venezuela’s National Institute of Hygiene has a PCR testing capacity of just 100 samples a day, a fact that has likely contributed to the supposedly low infection rate.

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