THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
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Brazil restricts access to coronavirus data as deaths surge

Brazil restricts access to coronavirus data as deaths surge

RIO DE JANEIRO - As Brazil posts some of the highest daily coronavirus death totals in the world, President Jair Bolsonaro is reducing the amount of data his government is releasing to the public.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the country's Health Ministry has maintained detailed and robust data on the spread and reach of the disease that has officially infected more than 672,000 people here and killed nearly 36,000. But that information disappeared from a government website Saturday, to be replaced by a daily tally that shows only the numbers from the previous 24 hours.

The sudden removal of the cumulative data led to criticism as people in cities returned to their balconies to bang pots and detractors suggested the federal government was trying to obscure the gravity of a public health crisis it has done little to address. President Jair Bolsonaro, who continues to dismiss the disease even as it maims his country, has repeatedly questioned the accuracy of the data and grown increasingly assertive in his efforts to restrict access to it.

His administration rescheduled the daily release of data last week so it would come out after newspaper deadlines and nightly news programs. Bolsonaro said Friday that the delay "stopped the stories in the National Journal," a popular nightly news show.

One of Brazil's top health officials, appointed last week, also sought to undermine the country's coronavirus numbers on Friday. Carlos Wizard, the Health Ministry's new secretary of science and technology, said a new count should be available within a month.

"I believe there will be more trustworthy data, because the number that we have today is fantastical or manipulated," he said. He said without offering evidence that data had been inflated by local health officials who, "purely in interest of getting bigger city and state budgets, are saying everyone had covid."

State secretaries of health said the allegation betrayed a "profound ignorance."

"His disgusting comment, disproved by any ethical sense, humanity and or respect, warrants our contempt, repudiation and disgust," the Secretaries of Health National Council said in a statement. "We are not merchants of death."

The growing lack of transparency underscores how completely Bolsonaro has taken control of the country's federal response to the pandemic. He fired Health Secretary Luiz Henrique Mandetta after they publicly clashed over the need to maintain social distancing and temporarily close nonessential businesses. He pushed out Mandetta's replacement, Nelson Teich, after Teich resisted his pressure to advocate the use of the anti-malarial drug chloroquine in coronavirus cases, despite potentially fatal side effects.

Bolsonaro has chosen a military official with no medical training as the interim health minister.

Brazil has long struggled to maintain accurate coronavirus data. Until now, however, the concern was that it was underestimating the severity of the crisis - not the other way around. Unable to buy or produce enough tests, Brazil was at one time testing 32 times fewer people than the United States and 12 times fewer than Iran - but still posting one of the world's largest outbreaks. The scant testing has led researchers to believe Brazil's outbreak is has about five to 15 times more infected people than the official register shows.

The disagreement over the data fits into a broader pattern for Bolsonaro. The right-wing populist, a fierce advocate for commercial development in the Amazon rainforest, claimed last year that government deforestation monitors "sometimes lie" and their data is "exaggerated." He then fired the country's top deforestation watchdog.

When the number of forest fires in the Amazon started to sharply rise - a phenemon linked to deforestation - he claimed without evidence that the fires had been lit by nongovernmental organizations linked to U.S. actor Leonardo DiCaprio to make him look bad.

Now scientists fear the Bolsonaro administration is moving to hide more data he doesn't like, politicizing what should be an objective tally, with human lives in the balance.

"In any country, if you do a recount, you will find an increase in the number of deaths," said Mauro Sanchez, an adjunct professor of public health at the University of Brasília. "But if they do a recount and come up with a smaller number of deaths than what they are reporting now, we will have to take this number with a grain of salt. . . . Where is this going?"

Domingos Alves, a data scientist at the University of São Paulo, said the country is increasingly resembling North Korea.

"It is a government that, for ideological reasons, is isolating itself from the world and withholding information like North Korea."

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