During the government session held on 21 May, the Prime Minister informed, “The issue that the government is giving people money so that they agree to be diagnosed with coronavirus, is discussed among the public.”
So far, there have been rumors that relatives of the deceased have been offered money to give their consent to register that their relative has died of coronavirus.
On 12 June, the Prime Minister announced in the National Assembly that the sources of spreading misinformation about the coronavirus should be clarified.
In response to a question from Iravaban․net, the Prime Minister said at the briefing after the 16 June meeting of the Commandant’s Office that the work was in progress.
“First of all, I want to understand how those thoughts are born. The biggest criticism we are facing today is that the number of people infected with coronavirus is high and people are dying every day. In other words, do we give our opponents a tool to criticize us? From the first day, we have done our best to be 100 percent transparent. Can you imagine, the citizen of Armenia has no such information about the coronavirus, which he does not have; there is no working secret at all. Once there were 4 numbers in the statistics that we could correct without announcing, combining the data of the previous day and the next day, but I announced again at the government session, I said, dear people, you know, there was a mistake in some numbers, and we are correcting it,” the Prime Minister said.
Nikol Pashinyan said that work is being done to reveal the sources.
“I didn’t even know whether to say it or not, but I must say, no matter how bad it sounds. For example, when we were isolating people at the “Golden Palace” Hotel in Tsakhkadzor, very specific circles, I will now say what news, you will already guess what the news is, now we just have to assess the extent to which the news has spread. Although it is clear that even as a result of speaking to each other it is expanding. Such rumors have been circulated by representatives of an opposition political circle that in fact, the people are not isolated there, and actually, the World Congress of Sexual Minoritiesis secretly being held in Armenia, in “Golden Palace” Hotel, this is why the hotel is closed, so that people do not know what the issue is. Do you understand? So insidious. So low. Then the same people used the situation with the coronavirus against the government, saying that they had spread rumors that there was no coronavirus. And they also faced that problem, because a family member of a representative of a particular political circle, who spread the news, also became infected with the coronavirus, of course, quite recently, but it is not significant. Do you understand to what extent a low and anti-state action can be carried out?” Prime Minister Pashinyan said.
According to him, the government is dealing with these issues, and if de jure responsibility is not found, because there are legislative gaps, the option of making these issues public should be discussed so that the public has the opportunity to assess them.
