“We are in one of the most tragic moments in history when millions of people are paying a heavy price because they have an unprepared and psychopathic leader in charge of a nation,” Joao Doria said in an interview with CNN on Monday.
Doria said many of the deaths due to the virus in Brazil could have been avoided if Bolsonaro “acted with the responsibility the post gives him”.
He added that Bolsonaro “made incredible mistakes, the biggest one was to have a political dispute with the governors who are trying to protect the population.”
Bolsonaro has repeatedly lashed out at blockages and restrictive measures, criticizing governors and mayors for their implementation.
The governor added that he was facing the biggest challenge in his life as governor of Brazil’s largest state, and that he had to restructure the health care system in ‘record time’ and look for ways to deal with the economic crisis that plagued the country during the pandemic. hit, to soften. .
Doria also spoke about the serious condition of hospitals and ICUs in Sao Paulo and said that they have already tripled the number of ICU beds and will open 12 field hospitals in the state this month.
The Covid-19 crisis in Brazil has never been worse.
Nearly every Brazilian state has an ICU occupancy rate of 80% or higher, according to a recent CNN analysis of state data. As of Friday, 16 of 26 states were up or higher than 90%, meaning health systems have collapsed or are at imminent risk of doing so.
And as of Friday, less than 10 million people in the country of about 220 million have received at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine, according to federal health data. Only 1.57% of the population was fully vaccinated.
This is due to a slow implementation program plagued by delays. During the announcement of its distribution plan in early February, the government promised that about 46 million doses of vaccinations would be available in March. It has been repeatedly forced to reduce the number, and now only 26 million doses will be available by the end of the month.
According to Doria, 90% of the vaccines in Brazil were produced by the Butantan Institute in Sao Paulo – linked to the Sao Paulo government – and that by the end of August they would make 100 million vaccines available across the country.
“It’s still not enough,” he said, adding that the federal government began buying vaccines in March, while the state of Sao Paulo began in April last year.
Matt Rivers of CNN contributed to this report.