Romanian Minister of Health Accuses Government of Manipulating COVID-19 Statistics

Update: on Wednesday, March 24, Romanian minister of Health, Vlad Voiculescu, partially withdrew his accusation in a post on Facebook:

What I can tell you for sure is that the current way of calculating (the incidence rate) is proper to the present context and there is nothing dramatically incorrect with the way it was calculated before.

Romanian minister of Health, Vlad Voiculescu, on his accusations

Initial news: The Romanian Minister of Health, Mr. Vlad Voiculescu, posted on Facebook a comment where he bluntly accuses the Government of manipulating COVID-19 statistics. The incriminated act happened, according to Mr. Voiculescu, last year, just before the elections. From his comment, one can understand it is about the general elections from last year, which took place on December 6. At that moment, the infection rate was decreasing.

He commented to a post on Facebook of the former minister of Labor, Mrs. Violeta Alexandru. In her post, she allusively talks, without naming names, about how the current minister of Health doesn’t offer but political declarations saying he doesn’t trust the statistics published regarding the evolution of the pandemic.

The answer of Mr. Vlad Voiculescu is a straight accusation per se:

Dear Violeta, we need to build trust and we will succeed only if we tell the truth. The “innovative” way of calculating the COVID-19 incidence rate before the elections made me ask myself a few questions:

1) from the calculation there were taken out the numbers from the outbreaks – nowhere in Europe it has ever done likewise;

2) from the calculation of the incidence for the previous 14 days there were “lost” a couple of days.

These are the “innovative calculations” I have been surprised to find out…

Romanian Minister of Health public comment on Facebook

At the moment we publish this material, his comment gathered more than 2.6 K reactions and 192 replies.

So far, no official explanation has been offered by the Ministry of Health apart from this comment. Romanian president, Mr. Klaus Iohannis, was the only official to comment on the incident:

Nobody manipulated the data, not before the elections, nor after the elections. I think that it was used a not proper expression. The calculation formulas used are different. Nobody hide data or information.

Romanian president on minister of Health’s accusations

It has to be mentioned that, even if they both belong to the governmental political coalition, the former minister of Labor and the current minister of Health belong to different parties. The first belongs to the National Liberal Party, which has also offered the PM, the second belongs to the USR-PLUS coalition, known as the reformist political movement.

There is a certain tension within the Romanian political forces which form the governing coalition, but also within the main governing political party, the National Liberals. If the first is understandable, to a certain point, as both parties have different ideologies, the issues among the leaders of the Liberal Party outbroke when the current leader of the party, Mr. Ludovic Orban, lost his position as PM during the negotiations to form the governing coalition.

It is not the first collision between the political forces within the current Government and it will certainly not be the last one. What is important though for the economy and the health system is for both to function at their best, such as the country and the citizens to suffer as little as possible during this pandemic and the crisis it triggered.