Victoria's Chief Health Officer hides criticism after garlic tweet controversy

Three years after Victoria's Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton insisted garlic was not effective in preventing Covid-19, Australian scientists have found the vegetable has a 99.9 per cent efficacy rate against the virus.

Sutton yesterday took the extraordinary step of hiding replies to his 2020 tweet so that criticism of his poorly-aged stance on garlic as a treatment for Covid-19 was not visible.

The Doherty Institute announced yesterday that scientists had discovered a type of garlic that kills the coronavirus.

But in 2020, when people were suggesting garlic could be of use in the fight against the disease, Brett Sutton tweeted: “I love garlic, but I’m not going to rely on it to keep me safe!”

Sutton was replying to a World Health Organisation tweet that said: “WHO has been working to track and respond to rumours and myths around #2019nCoV.”

The WHO wrote:

“There is no evidence from the current outbreak that eating garlic has protected people from the new coronavirus”.

Sutton, along with the WHO and other health officials, had continually raged during the pandemic against people who "spread misinformation."

Social media users flooded Sutton’s twitter feed yesterday, quoting his 2020 tweet and accusing him of spreading misinformation.

Many people asked if he would apologise for dismissing people as myth spreaders when it now turned out that they had been right all along.

“My great grandmother could have told you about garlic. It's common knowledge amongst the older generations,” one person tweeted to Sutton.

Others demanded Sutton’s resignation from Victoria’s top health job.

They complained that governments could have saved billions of dollars of taxpayer money developing vaccines – which were mandated for people whether they wanted them or not – when a natural remedy was available all along.

“So let me get this right the government forces to take an experimental vax that history has proven was of little benefit but with side effect risks when garlic worked,” wrote one person.

Another tweeted:

“The Victorian CHO like all the other CHOs, Premiers and anyone else in a position of authority will never apologise. They'll just hope like hell we don't notice and move on.”

 

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