Judge orders Bolsonaro to resume publishing
Brazil Covid-19 data
Move comes amid accusations government was trying to
suppress the scale of the crisis
Tom
Phillips and Caio Barretto Briso in Rio de Janeiro
Tue 9 Jun
2020 15.25 BSTLast modified on Tue 9 Jun 2020 15.53 BST
A Brazilian
supreme court judge has ordered Jair Bolsonaro’s administration to resume
publishing complete Covid-19 statistics after moves to suppress such
information prompted accusations of authoritarian skulduggery designed to cover
up the crisis.
The
Brazilian government sparked outrage on Saturday by purging the health ministry
website of historical data relating to the pandemic and announcing it would
stop publishing the cumulative death toll or number of infections.
Officials
claimed the changes would help “refine” official coronavirus data. But critics
attacked what they called an illiberal ruse to conceal the severity of the
pandemic’s impact in Brazil, where more than 37,000 lives have been lost.
Some drew
parallels with the suppression of information in authoritarian countries such
as North Korea and Venezuela while others recalled how Brazil’s own military
regime had covered up a meningitis epidemic in the 1970s, with devastating
consequences.
On Monday
night, supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes reportedly gave Bolsonaro’s
administration a 48-hour deadline to begin releasing the full figures again
each day, after a legal challenge from two opposition parties.
Randolfe
Rodrigues, the opposition leader in the senate, celebrated the move. “The
government will now be obliged to release the pandemic data, as before, without
make-up or manipulation,” the senator tweeted.
On Monday,
in the absence of comprehensive official statistics, a coalition of major
Brazilian news outlets published their own tally of the country’s total number
of Covid-19 deaths and infections: 37,312 and 710,887 respectively. Only the US
has recorded more cases.
Bolsonaro
continues to attack what he calls the media’s sensationalising of Covid-19,
which he has called “a bit of a cold”.
At a
televised cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Bolsonaro accused journalists of causing
“panic” and seized on a comment from a World Health Organization official that
the transmission of coronavirus by people with no symptoms could be “rare” as
proof Brazil should be reopening.
“What we
most want is to get back to normal and for the country to retake the path of
prosperity,” Bolsonaro said.
One vocal
ally, the citizenship minister, Onyx Lorenzoni, blamed media mendacity for
exaggerating Brazil’s problems. “Whatever the government does, the extremist
press always tries to create controversy or do down its work,” he told
Bolsonaro.
“But I’m
sure that with God in your heart and the truth that you always carry with you …
you realise we will knock down these lies, one by one,” Lorenzoni added.
The latest
row surrounding the president’s response to the pandemic comes as many key
states, including São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, start partially reopening,
contrary to the advice of many specialists.
On
Saturday, Rio’s governor announced shopping centres and bars would be able to
reopen – although those moves were temporarily halted by a court injunction on
Monday.
Margareth
Dalcolmo, a researcher from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a biomedical research
institute, said it was too early to reopen. “I fear this premature reopening
that we are seeing will cause an explosion of cases in two weeks – which is the
time between infection and symptoms,” the pneumologist warned.
“Our
governors and mayors must be open to a new shutdown.”
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