“Thanks to the work we have done”, “not a single case of this disease has yet been detected in Turkmenistan,” Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, who has been in power since 2006, said in a rare interview with an international television channel.
Turkmenistan, along with North Korea and some isolated archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean, is one of the few countries and territories in the world that claims to have had no human cases of the novel coronavirus (SARS-Cov-2) since the start of the pandemic crisis.
However, the country, which borders Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Iran, has just begun to loosen its restrictive measures during the pandemic last April, with restaurants and mosques reopening.
Rail traffic has also resumed, but air traffic is still suspended.
In an interview with the Moscow TV channel Mir, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov said that there are two vaccines against coronavirus developed in Russia in Turkmenistan: Sputnik V and EpiVacCorona.
The assurances of the President of Turkmenistan that there was no infection in the country arouse suspicion by Turkmen observers and the media working from abroad.
According to these sources, a Turkish diplomat based in the country’s capital, Ashgabat, died of COVID-19 last year, and in December, the British ambassador admitted through social media that he had contracted the virus in Turkmenistan.
With a pandemic raging around the world in the spring of 2020, Turkmenistan was one of the last countries to allow public presence in stadiums.
The authorities have long discouraged the use of personal protective masks to prevent transmission of the virus.
This position of the authorities will be changed after the visit of representatives of the World Health Organization (WHO) to the country in July 2020.
At the time, a UN agency expressed concern about the rise in the number of “acute respiratory diseases or pneumonia” in the country and recommended that the authorities take action “as if the covid-19 disease were circulating.”
