Fri Feb 11, 2022 – 7:36 pm EST
(LifeSiteNews) – The doctor who helped discover the Omicron COVID-19 variant said she was told by European officials to say Omicron is not a mild illness but a serious one.
“I was told not to explain publicly that it was a mild illness. I was asked to refrain from such statements and to say that it is a serious illness. I refused,” Dr. Angelique Coetzee, head of the South African Medical Association, told the German newspaper Welt.
She was responding to Welt’s request for confirmation of the rumor that she was “encouraged to present Omicron as serious as the previous variants.”
In fact, Coetzee has described Omicron as “extremely mild.”
Coetzee did not reveal in the interview which officials encouraged her to “keep quiet.” She also said she was later “criticized by authorities in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.”
“My reports have thrown them off track,” Coetzee stated. “In a pandemic, you also have to look at what is happening at the grassroots level. The general practitioners who treat the sick every day must be asked what they experience.”
She explained that as a clinician, she sees
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