São Paulo State Governor João Doria called Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro a “psychopathic leader” and criticized the president’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic in an interview with CNN’s Julia Chatterley on Monday.
“We are in one of those tragic moments in history, when millions of people pay a high price for having an unprepared and psychopathic leader in charge of a nation,” he said on CNN’s First Move.
Doria said that a large part of the deaths from the virus in Brazil could have been prevented if Bolsonaro had “acted with the responsibility that the position gives him”. He added that Bolsonaro made “unbelievable mistakes, the biggest of which was having a political dispute with the governors who are trying to protect the population”.
Bolsonaro has repeatedly opposed blockades and restrictive measures and criticized governors and mayors for implementing them. He was also seen complimenting multitudes of his supporters during the pandemic, without wearing a mask, and defended drugs such as hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus – a drug that has no proven effectiveness in combating Covid-19.
The governor added that he faces the biggest challenge of his life as governor of the largest state in Brazil and that he had to restructure the health system in “record time” and look for ways to mitigate the economic crisis that hit the country during the pandemic. He spoke about the severity of the state of São Paulo hospitals and ICUs, saying that the number of ICU beds has already tripled and that 12 field hospitals in the state will be opened this month.
Regarding vaccines, the governor said that 90% of vaccines in Brazil are produced by the Butantan Institute of São Paulo – linked to the São Paulo government – and that by the end of August, they will have made available 100 million vaccines across the country. “It is still not enough,” he said, adding that the federal government started buying vaccines in March, while the state of São Paulo started in April last year.
The second wave of Covid-19 is devastating Brazil, pushing hospitals and ICUs to collapse and claiming record numbers of daily deaths.
As a new variant of the coronavirus spreads across the country, many Brazilians continue to challenge the mobility restrictions of the mask’s mandates, following the example of President Jair Bolsonaro, who recently said that people need to “stop being sissy” and “complain” of the virus.
Brazil has reported a total of 11,998,233 cases of Covid-19 and 294,042 deaths related to Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the country’s ministry of health.
Read more about the situation in Brazil: No vaccines, no leadership, no end in sight. How Brazil became a global threat