I will donate my blood for research on COVID-19 —Makinde

NEWS

Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State has expressed his readiness to donate his blood as sample for research in the quest to find a cure to the COVID-19 pandemic.

When necessary, he said, his blood could be taken for evaluation by experts on post-infection protection against the deadly infection.

Makinde, who is a survivor of COVID-19, indicated his intention on Wednesday via his official Twitteraccount.

He wrote, “We have been advocating for local solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic in Oyo State. So, as a COVID-19 survivor, I volunteered to donate my blood to be studied by our experts researching on the ‘Evaluation of Post Infection Protection Against SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) in Nigeria.”

Earlier, Makinde had said, “We are looking at local solutions. I know that a lot of people have been calling me all sorts of names on the social media but, from my experience, one thing that I know you have to do to conquer the virus is that you have to boost your immunity. We do have local solutions and, of course, we have to defer to experts’ opinion as part of the home-grown solution to deal with COVID-19.

“People may ask if we have been funding the research institutes very well. They may even ask if we are in a position to bring any kind of solution to the world. My answer is yes. Even chewing something like bitter-cola. When the Western World is having flu season, they have flu shots. But here, we have things like catarrh. When we are crossing over from dry season to rainy season, people almost always fall sick. Cold, cough, catarrh, we have ways of dealing with all of these locally.

“So, except a solution comes from the Western or Eastern world, I won’t say that we cannot deal with it. I believe we have the capacity. We have the intellect to look at things that work locally and we will keep encouraging that. We have the capacity to also validate some of the results that we are going to be getting.

“They did clinical trials for chloroquine and some other medications but these are things we take normally here. So, we are not ruling out a local solution to this pandemic.”

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