Supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) began to share on the internet counts of deaths from Covid-19 since the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT).
Publications associating the deaths with the Lula government gained prominence this Tuesday (10) by being associated with the keyword #lulagenocida. The term was among the most mentioned topics on the social network.
Most publications criticized, however, the arrests of coup plotters who invaded and vandalized the Planalto Palace, Congress and the STF (Federal Supreme Court) last Sunday (8).
During the moments of greatest lethality of the pandemic, counting the deaths caused by the virus was one of the issues that put the Bolsonaro administration in opposition to health authorities and the press.
The previous government even delayed the release of daily data. Critics of Bolsonaro’s conduct in relation to the health crisis began to call the former president a genocide.
Insecurity regarding the disclosure of data led the vehicles SheetUOL, O Estado de S. Paulo, Extra, O Globo and G1 to create a consortium to gather and disseminate figures relating to the pandemic, based on data collected daily with the State Health Secretariats.
A post shared by Bolsonarist groups on the social network Twitter, with almost 100 thousand views since last Friday (6), stated that the country had more than 500 deaths in the first week of the PT government. In the period between January 1st and 6th, that number was actually 882, according to the press consortium count. In bulletins from the Ministry of Health, the number is 926.
In the same period last year, 621 people lost their lives as a result of Covid. In the same days of 2021, there were 4,067 deaths. The data is from the vehicle consortium.
The publication uses part of the sentence uttered by Lula in 2020 to criticize Bolsonaro’s conduct in relation to privatizations in the face of the projection obtained by the SUS (Sistema Único de Saúde) in facing the health crisis.
“When I see these people think that they have to sell everything that is public and that everything that is public is worthless… I am glad that nature, against humanity’s will, created this monster called the coronavirus, because this monster is allowing that the blind see, that the blind begin to see, that only the state is capable of solving certain crises”, said Lula, on the occasion.
In another post shared by Bolsonaristas, on the fourth day after the new government took office, the text accompanying the montage with a false magazine cover noted 429 deaths. The number computed by the press is 501. In the government database, there are 558.
The CPI that investigated the Bolsonaro government’s actions to face the health crisis concluded that the management was silent and acted “in a non-technical and reckless way” in facing the pandemic, “deliberately exposing the population to a concrete risk of mass infection”.
Irregularities were pointed out in vaccine negotiations, delay in buying effective immunizers, negligence to avoid sanitary collapse in Amazonas and lack of planning to prepare and execute the budget in the pandemic.
There was also the disclosure of medicines that were ineffective for the treatment of Covid.
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