President Maduro denounces relentless campaign to discredit Venezuela’s efforts to contain COVID-19

President Nicolás Maduro denounced a relentless campaign spearheaded by international mass media to downplay the Bolivarian Government’s efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. He said that over a month ago, extreme rightwing mass media such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Miami Herald claimed that “Venezuela would become the epicenter of coronavirus in Latin America and later the world epicenter of the virus.” With the Venezuelan government early containing COVID-19 and implementing sanitary measures, a policy that has positioned Venezuela as the South American country with the lowest mortality rate (0.03 deaths per 1 million inhabitants), Maduro pointed out that the media campaign is systematic, and that correspondents from news agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press try to smear Venezuela in the eyes of the international public opinion. The Venezuelan president referred to a report published by the Spanish news agency EFE on Saturday that discredits both the social quarantine measure as the most efficient tool to contain the spread of the virus and the Venezuelan Government’s efforts to guarantee social assistance to the Venezuelan people. President Maduro invited the Venezuelan people to fight this “malicious campaigns of manipulation and psychological war” with ideas and the power of truth through social networks. Earlier on Friday, Communications Vice-president Jorge Rodríguez also denounced the continuation of the media war fostered by the U.S empire, the Colombian and the Venezuelan extreme right. Rodríguez added that these extreme right-wing sectors “insist on spreading lies, waging a psychological war and reducing the self-esteem of Venezuelans to make them feel psychologically defeated” in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.