5PH/iStock(NAIROBI) — Mike Sonco, the governor of Kenya’s capital city, Nairobi, is taking some heat for including bottles of Hennessy — a brand of cognac — in COVID-19 care packages.
“We are giving some small bottles of Hennessy in the food packs that we will be giving to our people…,” says Sonco in a video posted to Citizen TV Kenya’s Twitter page, before falsely claiming, “the World Health Organization [WHO] and various other organizations [believe that] alcohol plays a very major role in killing the corona virus.”
In fact, WHO/Europe, contrary to Sonco’s claim, maintains that alcohol actually makes a person more vulnerable to the pandemic, and that access should be restricted.
Sonko is also facing blowback from the makers of Hennessy. The brand’s country manager, Anne-Claire Delamarre, says in a statement to Nairobi News that “our brand or any other alcoholic beverage does not protect against the virus.”
There were 270 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the East African nation as of Sunday, according to Johns Hopkins University.
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