Outrage at president’s response to news that more than 5,000 people have lost their lives

This article is more than 4 months old

This article is more than 4 months old

More than 5,000 Brazilians have lost their lives to the coronavirus – even more people than in China, if its official statistics are to be believed.

But on Tuesday night Brazil’s president shrugged off the news. “So what?” Jair Bolsonaro told reporters when asked about the record 474 deaths that day. “I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”

Bolsonaro’s 11-word response – the latest in a series of remarks belittling the pandemic – sparked immediate fury. One newspaper, the Estado de Minas, stamped the president’s words on to a black front page beside Brazil’s death toll: 5,017.

“Bolsonaro isn’t just an awful politician and a bad president, he’s a despicable human being,” tweeted Marcelo Freixo, a leftwing opponent.

“My name’s Messiah,” Bolsonaro also told reporters on Tuesday, in reference to his second name, Messias. “But I can’t work miracles.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Since Brazil confirmed its first case on 26 February, Bolsonaro has continually minimised the pandemic. Photograph: Evaristo Sa/AFP via Getty Images

A wave of disgust swept over social media as word of the president’s comments spread. “A sociopath,” tweeted the musician Nando Moura. “What a tragedy,” wrote the journalist Sônia Bridi.

“It’s a mockery. An insult. It is intolerable,” tweeted Mariliz Pereira Jorge, a scriptwriter and commentator.

Another critic superimposed Bolsonaro’s words on to a photograph of the muddy graves into which scores of Brazilian bodies are being deposited each day.

“Bolsonaro wants to turn Brazil into the Republic of So What,” the political commentator Bernardo Mello Franco wrote in his column on Wednesday.

The president’s son Carlos Bolsonaro claimed on Twitter that his father’s comments were being distorted by liberal journalists seeking to destroy his reputation.

Since Brazil confirmed its first coronavirus case on 26 February, Bolsonaro has continually minimised the pandemic, rejecting media “hysteria” over its dangers and suggesting Brazilians could swim in excrement and emerge unscathed.

The Trump-admiring populist has also purposefully undermined social distancing guidelines, mingling with supporters and sacking his health minister on 16 April after he publicly challenged the president’s behaviour.

Play Video 8:37 Bolsonaro won't help with coronavirus, so Brazil's favelas are helping themselves - video

Last week, Bolsonaro’s popular justice minister, Sergio Moro, resigned from government, partly as a result of the president’s anti-scientific stance on Covid-19, according to one person who knows him.

There is no escaping the scale of the tragedy unfolding in Brazil, with daily images of gravediggers in protective suits emerging from some of the worst-hit cities, including Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Recife and Manaus.

Rio's favelas count the cost as deadly spread of Covid-19 hits city's poor Read more

As Bolsonaro made his remarks, newspapers and television programmes filled with stories about the mothers, fathers, sons and daughters losing their lives to the pandemic.

In Rio, the victims included Ana Maria, a 56-year-old nursing assistant who had worked in one of the city’s biggest public hospitals and was laid to rest on Tuesday by men in white suits.

“She gave everything to her job until the very end,” her daughter Taina told Associated Press.

In Vila Operária, a redbrick favela to the north of Rio, at least 10 residents were reported to have died, including four members of the same family.

Health specialists fear Covid-19 – which is moving into poor regions, having initially affected middle- and upper-class areas – could wreak havoc on Brazil’s most deprived and vulnerable communities.

“I’m scared,” Josiete Pereira do Carmo, who lost her mother and three uncles, told one local TV network. “We can’t lose anyone else.”