Poland’s former president and Solidarity pro-democracy movement leader Lech Walesa said on Friday that he has contracted COVID-19.
The 78-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate said on Facebook that he was surprised to find out he is infected despite the three vaccination doses he has received.
“I can’t believe it: I received 3 shots [but] I’m infected.”
“[I have a] headache, I can’t warm up my body. I feel like my flesh is tearing away from the bones,” Walesa wrote.
“After this painful lesson I will never separate from my mask,” he stated.
Walesa was fitted with a pacemaker in 2008 and last year he had heart surgery.
In the 1980s, Walesa led the nationwide Solidarity or Solidarność movement that eventually toppled Poland’s communist leaders through an election in 1989.
Incarcerated for his activism in the early 1980s, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983.
Walesa served as democratic Poland’s first popularly elected president in 1990, with his term ending in 1995.
Walesa is an open critic of Poland’s current PiS-led right-wing government, which has accused him of being a paid communist informant, an allegation he has vehemently denied.