Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Photo: Andre Borges/NurPhoto via Getty Images For the last few weeks Brazilians have had to watch a torturous soap opera, starring two politicians bickering endlessly as a deadly pandemic spreads across the country. One protagonist was the most right-wing major leader in the democratic world, and now perhaps the loudest coronavirus skeptic on the planet.
“Medically speaking, Brazil is more or less in the same situation that the United States was three to four weeks ago, which means that a lot of people have the virus but do not know it yet,” says Paulo Buss, director of Global Health at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a leading scientific institute in Rio de Janeiro. There are 30,000 officially registered cases in the country, but Buss believes there may be eight to 12 times that many infected Brazilians.
Then Mandetta, a member of his own cabinet, became the enemy of the day. As a congressman, he was part of an ultimately successful campaign to expel Cuban doctors from the country, and voted to impeach the center-left president Dilma Rousseff. A medical doctor, his approach to the virus began to diverge visibly from the president’s rhetoric and actions.
Mandetta did not just butt heads with Bolsonaro. He also became more popular. According to a recent poll, 76 percent of the country approved of the way he was doing his job, while only 33 percent support the way the president is handling the pandemic. That very popularity may have been another reason for his dismissal, says Mauricio Santoro, a political scientist at Rio de Janeiro State University.
Hmm... where have I heard this before? hmmm