One of the unbridled outbreaks of coronavirus in Brazil has become a global threat that could breed new and even more deadly variants, warned one of the top scientists in the South American country as he suffered his deadliest day of the pandemic .
In an interview with the Guardian, Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University who is monitoring the crisis, called on the international community to challenge the Brazilian government over its failure to contain an epidemic affecting more than a quarter of a million Brazilians. killed – about 10% of the the global total.
“The world needs to speak out strongly about the risks that Brazil poses to the fight against the pandemic,” Nicolelis said. He has spent most of the past year at his apartment on the west side of São Paulo.
“What is the point of resolving the pandemic in Europe or the United States if Brazil is still a breeding ground for this virus?”
Nicolelis said the problem was not just Brazil – whose right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, has repeatedly called for the fight against a disease he calls a “little flu” to be “the worst country in the world” in dealing with the pandemic ‘.
He said: “If you allow the virus to multiply at the levels it is currently spreading here, then you are opening the door to the emergence of new mutations and the emergence of even more deadly variants.”
One particularly worrying variant (P1) has already been detected after Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon, which had a devastating health disruption in January following a surge in infections. Six cases of the variant have so far been detected in the UK.
“Brazil is an outdoor laboratory for spreading the virus and eventually creating deadly mutations,” Nicolelis warned. “It’s about the world. It’s worldwide. ”
The warning came as Brazil entered the deadliest chapter of its year-long Covid crisis, with hospitals across the country collapsing or on the verge of collapse and reaching new average weekly deaths. A record 1,726 deaths were reported Tuesday, the highest number since the pandemic began.
“This is a battlefield,” a doctor in the southern city of Porto Alegre told local television after the hospital’s intensive care unit and morgue ran out of space.
Nicolelis said Bolsonaro’s failure to stop the outbreak and launch an adequate vaccination campaign had created a domestic tragedy from which the most populous country in Latin America would likely emerge by late 2022.
“We are now past 250,000 deaths, and my expectation is that if we did nothing, we could have lost 500,000 people here in Brazil in March. It is a frightening and tragic prospect, but at this stage it is entirely possible, ‘he said, predicting a traumatic month while public and private hospitals struggled.
“My prediction is that if the world is terrified of what happened in Bergamo in 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 advised the state governments on their Covid response, called for a special Covid commission to be set up to fill the leadership vacuum left by Bolsonaro and close an immediate 21-day nationwide shutdown. However, this seems almost unthinkable given Bolsonaro’s position. The Brazilian president will reportedly deliver a speech to the country on Wednesday in which he is expected to condemn the closure measures again.
Nicolelis claims that the crisis in Brazil now poses an international risk as well as a domestic risk, and claims that Bolsonaro – who forced social distance, promoted unproven drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and diminished masks – ‘the global public enemy No 1’ of became the pandemic.
He said: “The policies he does not implement jeopardize the fight against the pandemic across the planet.”
Bolsonaro, a former army captain who came to power in 2018 on a spate of anti-establishment rage, defended his performance, claiming his opposition to Covid restrictions is protecting Brazil’s economy. “I haven’t done anything wrong since March last year,” the 65-year-old told supporters.
José Gomes Temporão, Brazil’s health minister during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, said Bolsonaro’s response was so lacking that he and other senior administrators would eventually be “held accountable”.
“To this day, Brazil has no national plan to fight Covid-19,” Temporão complained, attacking Bolsonaro’s failure to obtain adequate vaccines by entering into deals to buy shots fired by companies such as Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. Only 3.3% of Brazil’s population has been vaccinated so far, compared to 15.2% in the US, 18% in Chile and 29.9% in the UK.
“I think there is no other leader who is so blunt, so backward, who has such a wrong and crooked view of reality as the president of Brazil,” Temporão said. “History will condemn these people.”