Brazil accused of manipulating Covid-19 death, infection toll
Critics are accusing President Jair Bolsonaro of manipulating the figures showing the spiralling Covid-19 coronavirus death toll in Brazil, after his government first stopped reporting the total number of fatalities and infections, and then released contradictory data.
Even as the problem has gotten worse in Brazil, the most recent epicentre in the pandemic, the health ministry has made a number of unusual moves about how it presents the numbers on Covid-19.
The ministry have been the official & most trusted source for nationwide virus statistics, which paint a grim picture of its impact on Brazil: 36,455 deaths, the third-highest toll on the globe, after the United States and Britain; and 691,758 infections, the second-highest caseload, after the US.
First, on Wednesday, the ministry started publishing the daily tally of infections and deaths around two . 5 hours later each evening, right before 10pm.
Many critics accused the federal government to do that in a bid to avoid negative coverage on "Jornal Nacional," a popular evening news programme on Globo TV, Brazil's biggest broadcaster.
Bolsonaro himself seemed to confirm as much when asked about the delay.
"That's the end of this story for 'Jornal Nacional,'" he said.
"Nobody needs to be running around due to Globo."
Then, on Friday, the ministry stopped publishing the full total number of deaths and infections, releasing only the figures for days gone by 24 hours for the country of 212 million people.
Things only got more muddled on Sunday, when the ministry released two different daily tolls at different times, without explaining why or indicating which was correct.
Had there been 1,382 new deaths and 12,581 new infections during the past a day, or 525 deaths and 18,912 infections? For half of a day, it was impossible to know.
The ministry - currently run by an interim health minister, whose two predecessors were ousted mid-pandemic after disagreements with Bolsonaro - explained on Monday that the prior day's figures have been corrected because a number of the data given by state health officials included duplicates.
But critics have already been brutal.
"That is a statistical coup d'etat," said newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, among Brazil's most-read, in a scathing editorial.
"Manipulating the amount of dead in a pandemic is a crime," said influential columnist Miriam Leitao in newspaper Globo.
The far-right president has famously compared the brand new coronavirus to a "little flu" and railed against stay-at-home measures to own it, citing their monetary toll.
The administration's changes to the way it handles the figures on the pandemic fuelled fears it could try to manipulate them.
Concern only grew when well-known businessman Carlos Wizard, who has been tapped to serve as a top adviser in medical ministry, said on Friday that the figures were "fantastical and manipulated."
That outraged state health officials who provide you with the underlying data.
"That is a senseless, inhuman, authoritarian and unethical attack to create anyone who has died from coronavirus invisible," they said.
Wizard later apologised to victims' families over the remark, and withdrew his candidacy for medical ministry post after online protesters threatened to boycott his companies.
"Manipulating statistics is a move used by totalitarian regimes," Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes wrote on Twitter.
"This trick will not absolve anyone of responsibility for a possible genocide."
He added the hashtags "no to censorship" and "dictatorship never again."
Former health minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta, who was fired by Bolsonaro in April, said the handling of the data shows "the government is more harmful compared to the virus."
The federal government had already become the butt of jokes because of its method of the numbers.
When it commenced putting the quantity of recovered patients in larger font than the number of dead on its website, one social media user snickered it had been like describing Brazil's humiliating 7-1 loss to Germany in the 2014 World Cup by saying "Brazil scored one goal, with 52 % ball possession and eight shots on goal."
"It creates a parallel reality, as though the owners of the Titanic said, 'We saved this many people,'" Tomas Traumann, former communications secretary under ex-president Dilma Rousseff, told AFP. - AFP
