A Gambian born international scientist, Dr Assan Jaye, has rubbished former President Yahya Jammeh’s claimed to have cure for the HIV/Aids virus.
Dr Jaye who gave a marathon testimony on the genesis of HIV at the country’s Truth Commission on Wednesday, disclosed that Jammeh’s claimed of curing HIV was not only baseless but quite “shocking”.
“I was not interested in what Jammeh was doing because for me it was all rubbish,” the scientist stated.
The internationally recognise scientist went further to debunked Jammeh’s treatment programme as sign of irresponsibility, noting that a head of state has an ultimate responsibility to protect the citizens and not the other way. He adduced that Jammeh’s experiment on the HIV patients was out of the ordinary. He also added that the disease is not curable but it can be control.
The former head of the HIV programme at the Medical Research Council MRC in The Gambia, explained how patients had abandoned their treatment after Jammeh’s declaration of having a cure for the disease.
“The President’s proclamation of curing a disease was to exploit the vulnerability of the patients by virtue of his position as President,” Dr Jaye asserted.
He also disclosed that several of those patients that went to Jammeh’s treatment programme have died but was kept from the public knowledge.
According to him, the situation has reached to a point that they had to stop the treatment to avoid competition with the President’s treatment programme that might ‘bring a political clash’ between the two sides.
“This was how we closed the HIV treatment at MRC and moved to Senegal,” he remarked.
He mentioned the building of a facility at the RVTH in Banjul for those patients who were getting treatment from them and transferred them before leaving the country.
