Tanzania’s new president Samia Suluhu has announced that she will be re-evaluating the county’s position on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Suluhu said she will be constituting a committee of experts to evaluate the Covid-19 pandemic and advise the government on the way forward.

“On the issue of Covid-19, I think I should form a committee of experts to look at it professionally and then advise the government. It should not be silenced, rejected or accepted without professional research,” she said.

“We cannot isolate ourselves as if we are an Island but also, we cannot accept everything brought to us. We cannot continue just reading about Covid-19 worldwide, yet Tanzania is all blank. It is incomprehensible.

“Tanzania needs to have its own understanding of where we stand on the issue of Covid-19.”

The late president John Pombe Magufuli had been skeptical about the impact and magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic and had refused to put in place any containment measures, saying Tanzania would pray about for the disease and move to other traditional ways of medicine

Magufuli’s government also said Tanzania would not procure vaccines despite the insistence of the World Health Organization (WHO) that the jab was necessary in curbing the spread of the virus.

Earlier this year, Tanzania introduced steam therapy as one of the ways to help the country fight Coronavirus.