Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

 Egyptian Scientists Globally Disprove Canadian Researcher Quoted by "Guardian"


Tue 17 Mar 2020 | 10:54 PM
Gehan Aboella

A group of Egyptian prominent scientists around the world have disproved what the Guardian, a UK daily newspaper, has claimed about the spread of the Coronavirus in Egypt.

They denied misinformation promulgated by a Canadian researcher who was quoted by the British newspaper.

A large number of Egyptian doctors and experts around the world signed a letter prepared by the great Egyptian doctor Osama Hamdi, a world-famed professor of diabetes and endocrinology, an associate professor at Harvard University in the United States of America (USA).

The letter including a presentation and clarification and all the details that can refute the lies published by the British newspaper "The Guardian".

The newspaper’s report based on what was mentioned in research published by a member of the professorate of the Canadian University of Toronto. It included false information about new infections of the Coronavirus in Egypt.

A large number of Egypt’s leading doctors and experts participated in signing the letter.

Among the signatories are Dr. Farouk El-Baz, Dr. Kamal Ibrahim and Professor Ra’afat Mansour, as well as members of the Foundation of “Egypt Can” doctors of the two initiatives “Tawassul” and “Home”.

In the same context, Dr. Osama Hamdi made clear that the letter will be sent to the Canadian University of Toronto and to the newspaper of "The Guardian" as well as the rest of the foreign media.

The letter bears the names of all these Egyptian doctors and experts who have taken upon themselves the responsibility to defend their homeland.

Nabila Makram with scientists

They succeeded in communicating together through the Egyptian Ministry of Immigration by linking those scientists and experts via creating a database that formed the basis of the Foundation of (Egypt –Misr- Can).

Dr. Hamdi added that the letter includes the following points:

1) The statistics mentioned by the Canadian researcher about the number of people contracted the virus in the Nile cruise, is hypothetical.

The researcher forgot that all the infected persons are foreign tourists and that the Egyptians who had contact with them were very few, so when the researchers around the world reviewed his opinion, he said that he might have exaggerated the figure and that the expected number may not exceed 6,000 people ( those who are vulnerable but are not exactly infected).

2- The British newspaper deliberately mentioned the number of 19 thousand as if they were infected.

The newspaper correspondent in Egypt, who is also a New York Times reporter, tweeted the same number, citing he quoted that number from Dr. Bogosh.

He retreated and said that he canceled his previous tweet so the number may be 6,000 cases.

This contradiction between the researcher and the newspaper confirms a strange relationship between them and that the researcher is the source of the information and not the scientific journal.

The reason that is likely is simple because the magazine did not publish the research yet, but it also refused to publish any information presented by Dr. Bogush as he himself mentioned in one of his tweets.

3) This doctor violated all scientific norms by publishing numbers that have not yet been published in a scientific journal.

He retracted those numbers and perhaps he concealed his relationship with the newspaper.

It is unreasonable that the source of the information was the scientific journal that did not publish the research but rather prevented the researcher from publishing the numbers contained in his article for reasons that we do not know.

The British newspaper "The Guardian" obtained from an unknown source a mini-research done by a Canadian researcher named Dr. Isaac Bogush, a researcher at the University of Toronto in Canada.

He claimed that the cases infected with the Coronavirus in Egypt are about 19 thousand infections, without any scientific scrutiny.

Then he retreated and said that the number of the infected people is 6 thousand when some specialists asked him about the scientific criteria on which he relied on mentioning those numbers.

Contributed by Ahmed Moamar