Opinion – Marcelo Leite: Bolsonaro insists on discrediting vaccines and producing deaths

Jair Bolsonaro has progressed. Deputy, he defended that the military dictatorship should have killed 30 thousand. In power, president, he helped send more than 100,000 to the grave — although many were not even enemies, perhaps 30,000 Bolsonaristas.

The crowd of dead people he sent “to the edge of the beach”, as he would say in his hateful language, makes up a significant portion of the 665,000 Brazilian victims. For those with a hairy heart and a crumbling brain, it may seem little in the face of 1 million coronavirus corpses in the US, or 13 to 17 million worldwide — but no.

First, there is underreporting, greater here than there. An estimate by Elisabeth França, from UFMG, published on May 5, indicated 18% more mortality in the first year of the pandemic, or 37,000 deaths above the official calculation in the period.

Assuming that the percentage has remained, we would be in the house of 875 thousand Brazilians victimized by Covid. And many people wouldn’t be surprised if the actual figure came close to 1 million, a dismal level that occasional optimists have always taken for granted.

You don’t even need to use this deflator, however, to realize that Brazil is on the low end and that Bolsonaro, a talentless imitator of Donald Trump, has surpassed the master. Just put the data in proportion to the respective populations.

Comparing 665 thousand with 213 million Brazilians, we arrive at 3.12 deaths per thousand inhabitants. In the United States, the calculation indicates 3.03/1,000 — a shame for the most developed country on the planet, of course, which had, however, a deep-rooted and broad anti-vaccination movement, which bolsominions have not yet achieved here.

It was not Bolsonaro’s lack of effort and character. Just now, he had the gall to take advantage of the increase in cases in China to throw expensive gasoline on the denialist fire, casting doubt on the effectiveness of João Doria’s coronavac, without which the country would have been hostage to presidential ignorance.

“Why does China have Covid? Isn’t the vaccine from there? What’s the problem? Or was it just a vaccine for export? There wasn’t supposed to be anyone with Covid in China”, chipped the president in his mental Stone Age.

The Asian dictatorship, which does not hesitate to impose draconian lockdowns in megacities like Shanghai, has so far had 15,602 deaths from Covid. With 1.4 billion inhabitants, it boasts a death rate of 0.01/1,000, he says that the man with the glass house didn’t bother to do it and maybe he couldn’t even (it’s not his job).

His specialty is throwing smoke into the eyes of the public — from the fires in the Amazon, the cerrado and the Pantanal, also of armored vehicles that are more obsolete than General Heleno. He wanted to put a helping hand on the numbers of cases and deaths, and it didn’t work, but the strong arm continues to play the cards in the Ministry of Health.

Dengue outbreaks spread across Brazil, and reagents are already lacking to carry out laboratory tests for conclusive diagnoses. It may just be a coincidence, but it is certainly a symptom of the deterioration of the state that one of the general-maharajas increases the secrecy of data on the stocks of medicines of the federal government.

The excuse given by Ridauto Fernandes, director of Health Logistics (he must be from the same school of management as Eduardo Pazuello), is to prevent sellers from increasing the prices of what the ministry urgently needs to buy.

And the fool here thinking that the administrator’s role is not to miss it. Or that it is the duty of the president, even a bad soldier, not to let his countrymen die.