The ‘Ostrich Alliance’ and their outlandish cures

Denial, steam and herbal tea among weapons against coronavirus endorsed by some PMS and presidents

ACROSS the world, as governments wrestle with the biggest health crisis in a century, presidents and prime ministers fret over flattened curves, PPE shortages and the race to develop a vaccine. Some leaders, though, have taken a rather less orthodox approach.

There have been predictions that it would all be over by Easter; glowing references to the healing powers of ingested disinfectant; and banner-waving for an antimalarial drug that, according to the medical evidence, remains controversial at best.

And that’s just from the president of the United States.

Others suggest the virus is a lesson from God; that herbal tea is a cure; that inhaling steam might “disintegrate” the virus. All of these unusual theories emanate from world leaders who are becoming known as the Ostrich Alliance.

Take John Magufuli, president of Tanzania. He quickly tore up the East African nation’s pandemic plan, which started with a ban on pubic gatherings, schools closing and quarantine on some arriving in the country. As the numbers rose, he urged people to go to church so divine intervention could cure the “satanic” virus, and spoke up for the powers of steam.

When videos of dead bodies in the street emerged, he accused the national laboratory of sabotage. He had, he said, secretly sent samples from a goat and papaya to the lab. The results came back positive: proof, he claimed, that the overall figures were inflated. No new figures have been released since April, and it is now a crime to distribute non-government data. While the US embassy last month warned its citizens the risk of infection was high and that hospitals in Dar es Salaam were being

“overwhelmed”, one of Magufuli’s top government officials proclaimed that God had defeated the virus.

In Madagascar, President Andry Rajoelina vowed that his country would test an injectable version of a herbal tea he claimed prevented and cured Covid-19. The island nation’s populist leader launched Covid-organics to push a remedy containing a cocktail of traditional herbs, including Artemisia, anti-malaria wormwood. The country’s national academy of medicine and the WHO have warned people not to take the unproven cure. Such an approach to public health advice would be all too familiar to citizens of Belarus. President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled since 1994, has rejected any restrictions. He mocked Russia for imposing restrictions and suggested that “not a single person” had died of Covid-19 in his country.

Underlying conditions, not the virus, were to blame for deaths, he said.

When social distancing was being recommended, Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s president, held a mass gathering in March titled “Love in the time of Covid-19”. He then disappeared for a month, before giving a speech calling

‘Plenty of democracies did very well and plenty of autocracies did very badly... and vice versa’

the outbreak “a sign from God”. Nicaraguans have been urged to keep working. As deaths have mounted, officials have resorted to “express burials” in the middle of the night to hide the losses.

And then there is Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro. He has called the virus a “little flu” and opposed lockdowns.

With deaths nudging 1,500 a day he had a simple approach. Death, he told Brazilians, is everyone’s destiny.

So is there a pattern? Thomas Hale of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government urges caution to the notion that authoritarian governments are more likely to embrace the weird and wacky. He said: “There’s plenty of democracies that did very well and plenty of autocracies that did very badly and vice versa.”