TRNC minister of health under fire for ‘lying’ about HPV vaccine

The TRNC minister of health Hakan Dincyurek on Saturday came under fire after allegedly lying about the historical availability of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in the north.

Dincyurek had announced on Friday that the HPV vaccine would be available “for the first time ever” in north Cyprus in January, with the aim of vaccinating women against cervical cancer.

However, his predecessor Filiz Besim, who served in post between 2018 and 2019 when her party the CTP were in power, pointed out that HPV vaccines had first been administered in the north while she was ‘minister’.

“HPV vaccines were first administered in the TRNC by the health ministry in 2019, Mr Dincyurek,” she began.

“However, there is an important issue that Dincyurek may not be aware of. All girls aged 12 were vaccinated [in 2019]. Two doses were administered, but this programme was not continued when the UBP returned to power because no money was allocated for it in any of the budgets,” she said.

She added, “it is really sad that [Dincyurek] gives out this misinformation and misleads society”.

Besim’s remarks are not the first time in recent months that Dincyurek has been accused of lying.

In October, he claimed that he had not informed the relatives of seven babies who had been fed ethanol at northern Nicosia’s emergency hospital for 30 hours as he had been ordered not to do so by police.

Mihrimah Toymuradov died aged just 20 days old, and the other six babies remained in intensive care, but Dincyurek and his ‘ministry’ did not make any statement on the matter until late in the evening of the following day, with Toymuradov’s parents only finding out their daughter had died a day after the fact.

“The reason behind us providing information late is the judicial investigation. The police told us to not make a statement,” he said.

However, the north’s police chief Kasim Kuni denied this, saying “the police did not warn the health minister at all not to make a statement”.

Cyprus Turkish nurses’ and midwives’ union chairman Ibrahim Ozgocmen also rubbished Dincyurek’s claims.

“It was [Dincyurek] himself who was told to call the families and let them come to the hospital to explain what happened, but he did not find this appropriate.”

He added that the hospital is being operated in “an environment of chaos” and that doctors “are being forced to do many things outside their job description.”

“The whole order is broken. The health ministry is being run like a party building.”

Cyprus Mail