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Brazil has resumed publication of the total number of victims of COVID-19 and has been criticized by the WHO
The Brazilian government resumed on Tuesday the announcement of the total number of victims of the coronavirus epidemic, accusing it of trying to cover up the magnitude of a rapidly worsening health crisis.
The government of far-right President Jairo Bolsonar stopped publishing the total number of pandemic victims last Friday, saying it was adopting a new methodology and reporting only the number of daily deaths in its daily reports.
Following the ruling, a number of influential government critics accused him of manipulating statistics, and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ruled Monday that the government should revert to its previous format.
The Health Ministry announced Tuesday that 1,272 other people died from a coronavirus infection with COVID-19, according to a judge’s ruling, bringing the total number of fatalities to 38,406. According to the figure, Brazil ranks third in the world after the United States and the United Kingdom. .
The ministry said the total number of confirmed infections rose to 739,503 and is the second largest in the world after the United States.
Experts say that in a country with 212 million. population, insufficient testing is done, so the true scope of the epidemic is likely to be much greater.
The Health Ministry has yet to respond to questions from the AFP news agency about why it was reverting to the previous format and how it plans to proceed in the future.
Bolsonar compares coronavirus infection to a “mild flu” that overreacts. He refuses to heed the recommendations of health experts on how to fight the epidemic, arguing that ordering people to stay home unnecessarily destroys Latin America’s largest economy.
Last Friday, he threatened to withdraw his country from the World Health Organization (WHO), accusing the United Nations agency of “ideological bias”. Brazilian Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo made similar criticisms of the WHO on Tuesday.
“The WHO lacks independence, transparency and coherence. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is monitoring its role with great concern,” he said.
“It just came to our attention then. We are talking about political influence, the impact of non-state actors on the World Health Organization,” added the minister.
By threatening to withdraw the country from the WHO, Bolsonar follows the example of the President of the United States, Donald Trump. The US leader cut ties with the United Nations health agency last month, accusing it of bias in favor of China.
Trump claims that Beijing has hidden the true scope of the outbreak, which started in late 2019 in China’s Wuhan, and that the infection has spread uncontrollably across the globe.
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