The rampant coronavirus outbreak in Brazil has become a global threat that risks generating new and even more lethal variants, warned one of the greatest scientists in the South American country, which suffered the deadliest day of the pandemic.
Speaking to the Guardian, Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University who is following the crisis, urged the international community to challenge the Brazilian government for not containing an epidemic that killed more than a quarter of a million Brazilians – about 10% of the total global.
“The world must speak vehemently about the risks that Brazil represents in the fight against the pandemic,” said Nicolelis, who spent most of last year confined in his apartment on the west side of São Paulo.
“What is the use of resolving the pandemic in Europe or the United States, if Brazil remains a breeding ground for this virus?”
Nicolelis said the problem was not simply Brazil – whose far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has repeatedly rejected efforts to fight a disease he calls “small flu” – being “the worst country in the world to deal with the pandemic” .
He said, “It’s just that if you allow the virus to proliferate at the levels at which it is proliferating here, you open the door for new mutations to occur and even more lethal variants to appear.”
A particularly worrying variant (P1) has already been traced to Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon, which suffered a devastating health meltdown in January after an increase in infections. Six cases of this variant have so far been detected in the United Kingdom.
“Brazil is an open-air laboratory for the virus to proliferate and eventually create more lethal mutations,” warned Nicolelis. “This is about the world. It’s global. “
The warning came when Brazil entered the deadliest chapter of its one-year Covid crisis, with hospitals across the country collapsing or on the verge of collapse and the average number of weekly deaths reaching new heights. A record 1,726 deaths were recorded on Tuesday, the highest number since the pandemic began.
“It’s a battlefield,” a doctor from the city of Porto Alegre told local television after the intensive care unit and his hospital’s morgue ran out of space.
Nicolelis said Bolsonaro’s failure to stop the outbreak and launch an adequate vaccination campaign created a domestic tragedy from which the most populous nation in Latin America will hardly emerge by the end of 2022.
“We have already surpassed 250 thousand deaths and my expectation is that, if nothing was done, we could have lost 500 thousand people here in Brazil until next March. It is a horrifying and tragic prospect, but at the moment it is perfectly possible, ”he said, predicting a traumatic month while public and private hospitals would go bankrupt.
“My prediction is that if the world was shocked by what happened in Bergamo, Italy, and what happened in Manaus a few weeks ago, it will be even more shocked by the rest of Brazil if nothing is done.”
The scientist, who has advised state governments in his response to Covid, called for the creation of a special Covid commission to fill the leadership vacuum left by Bolsonaro and an immediate 21-day national blockade. This, however, seems virtually unthinkable, given Bolsonaro’s position. On Wednesday, the Brazilian president will deliver a speech to the country in which he must again denounce the blocking measures.
Nicolelis said that the crisis in Brazil now represents an international and domestic risk and said that Bolsonaro – who sabotaged social detachment, promoted unproven drugs like hydroxychloroquine and belittled masks – became “the No. 1 global public enemy of the pandemic”.
He said: “The policies he is not putting in place endanger the fight against the pandemic across the planet.”
Bolsonaro, a former army captain who came to power in 2018 in a wave of hatred against the system, defended his performance, claiming that his opposition to Covid restrictions has to do with protecting Brazil’s economy. “I haven’t missed anything since March last year,” the 65-year-old told fans this week.
José Gomes Temporão, Brazil’s minister of health during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, said Bolsonaro’s response was so insufficient that he and other government figures would “end up being held accountable”.
“To date, Brazil does not have a national plan to combat Covid-19,” complained Temporão, attacking Bolsonaro’s failure to secure enough vaccines by closing deals to buy injections made by companies like Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. So far, only 3.3% of the Brazilian population has been vaccinated, compared to 15.2% in the United States, 18% in Chile and 29.9% in the United Kingdom.
“I don’t think there is another leader so obtuse, so backward, who has such a wrong and distorted view of reality as the President of Brazil,” said Temporão. “History is going to condemn these people.”