Former Czech President Václav Klaus has objected to allegations that he promotes coronavirus misinformation, demanding the Health Ministry to remove this claim from its website.
The Ministry of Health’s website provides links to the Center against Terrorism and Hybrid Threats and to Semantic Visions, which provides a list of the most common misinformation about COVID-19. Included in the misinformation is a warning entitled “Celebrities often promote misinformation.”
According to the text, disinformation sites take strong statements from public figures and experts and use them to support disinformation and conspiracy theories. “Recently, this has happened, for example, with statements from Václav Klaus and immunologist Jiří Beran,” the website states.
Klaus “fundamentally and categorically objected” to this. “I ask you to explain this unacceptable attack on me, to have the text in question removed from the website of the Ministry of Health, and to draw the appropriate consequences from this outrage,” he wrote to Blatný.
He stated that as a minister and a member of the government, Blatný is a politician. As a politician, according to Klaus, he is entitled to political opinions and to evaluate other political opinions. “This is part of politics. However, this is not about your personal polemics, but about information published on the official platform of the central body of state administration of the Czech Republic,” he wrote to the minister. According to him, it is unacceptable for the ministry’s website to be used for assault, defamation and unfounded accusations.
Klaus has been criticizing the government’s measures taken in connection with the fight against the pandemic. He considers coronavirus to be more than a “mere” disease and the misuse of this disease is a tool to transform the world . He has also repeatedly spoken in public without a face mask.
Title image: Czech Republic’s President Vaclav Klaus makes a statement reflecting on the death of former Czech President Vaclav Havel in Prague, Czech Republic, Sunday, Dec. 18, 2011. Havel, the dissident playwright who wove theater into politics to peacefully bring down communism in Czechoslovakia and become a hero of the epic struggle that ended the Cold War, died Sunday, Dec. 18, 2011, in Prague. He was 75. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)
