The councilor of Somos Lanzarote in the Arrecife City Council, Elisabeth Merino, has apologized this Monday for the statements she made last Friday in the Radio Lanzarote discussion group - Onda Cero, in which she stated that the coronavirus could be "a warning from nature that we may be filling the earth with many elderly people and not young people."
"I think I expressed myself badly. I didn't know how to correctly convey an opinion, since I am by no means an expert on this matter. I was wrong on this issue," the councilor stated, after the clip with those statements went viral this weekend, which have been shared on various social networks.
However, although she has apologized, Merino also believes that there has been a "disproportionate attack" against her. "I am convinced that they have tried to use words that were unfortunate on my part, to make public mockery and to make a political criticism that some parties have taken out of context on social networks to harm me, crossing the limits of respect a little," she lamented.
"A gratuitous damage has been done, also to my family"
Although she did not want to repeat the content of those criticisms, she pointed out that they have been disseminated through Facebook and also in personal messages. "A gratuitous damage has been done, not only to me, but also to my family", lamented the councilor, who states that her mother and her sisters - one of them a former contestant on Gran Hermano - have also received messages on their phones and "have been very worried about this issue."
"With this intervention I would like to settle this issue," the councilor claimed, emphasizing that she was doing it on the same radio where the controversy began, when the topic of the coronavirus was brought up in last Friday's discussion group. "I have my own theory," the councilor of Somos Lanzarote began by saying at that moment, who then explained that theory.
"It is true that everything has started, or they have wanted to see that it has started in China, and it is true that if these people are paralyzed, they paralyze the entire world, because they have that power. In the year 2008-2009, an alert was also raised that the birth rate in Spain had decreased dramatically and precisely in those years we women had, and I include myself, many multiple pregnancies, and they said that nature itself gave a solution to these small crises of the continuity of the human being. And I think that right now the virus is only attacking older people, not young people or children. There is no case that has been detected in any minor, only in older people. And I think that this virus that has mutated twice in order to concentrate, in order to kill it; that by itself it has mutated twice so that they don't catch it, I think that nature is giving us a warning that we may be filling the earth with many elderly people and not young people," she then explained.
"I am not an authorized voice on the matter"
"I am not an authorized voice on health matters, far from it. The arguments that should be taken into consideration are those of the health personnel", she wanted to specify three days later, to try to put an end to this controversy. In addition, she has stressed that what she said only "responds to an opinion" and to a question that "has nothing to do" with her responsibilities in the Arrecife City Council, where she governs together with the PP, the PSOE and Nueva Canarias, being in charge of the areas of Youth, Citizen Participation and Infractions.
"That is where I must be accountable to the neighbors," defended the councilor, who believes that "councilors from other political groups", and in particular from Coalición Canaria, took only a cut of her intervention to harm her. "I did not take the issue lightly at any time, on the contrary," she defended, recalling that she also spoke about her own situation of risk in the face of this disease, as she suffers from a respiratory disease.
"I am not very clear about what the intention of all this is. I do not give credit to extremely cruel messages," she insisted. Regarding whether she has considered leaving the position, Eli Merino has been blunt in ruling it out. "If one day I considered resigning, it would be because I have committed some illegality or some extremely important error in my job," she stated.