We can discuss semantics of whether it is genocide, mass murder, massacre, extermination, and frankly, it would get nowhere. However, especially for the small (still) rational part of Bolsonarists, it must be made clear that the president plays a leading role in the aggressiveness of the pandemic in Brazil.
First, let’s make the distinction. Nobody here is renaming economic and employment concerns as a crime against humanity. Bolsonaro can and should worry about the economy. You can even opt out of bans. This is part of the management game. Some actors tend to act tougher, others less, and fine-tuning is difficult.
The president’s crime is not to keep trade open and defend people’s livelihoods. It’s the campaign he’s waging – active, constant, tireless – to encourage contagion. The more the better.
Actions under the criminal plan: stimulating agglomerations, avoiding masks that reduce the spread, and introducing ineffective drugs to allay fear of the disease. If this is not effective, try again and call the cowards who are trying to avoid contagion.
None of this protects the economy. It stands up for the virus. The point is that people get infected, then others get infected, and who knows, if we can, we will achieve collective immunity by the most difficult path – the one where all those most at risk will die.
On which day Bolsonaro turned to his followers and said: “Folks, we have to keep the economy going, but let’s be very careful: social distance, everyone in a mask, without agglomeration, to protect life too. ” Rhetorical question.
Not even countries like the UK and Sweden, which flirted with collective immunity to contagion, were criminal enough to encourage the virus to spread. And that attitude, which was already insane, is now inconceivable when there is a safe and effective alternative. Vaccine. And what does the president do? It repeats itself, sows doubts, delays vaccine acquisitions and leads to conflict with federated companies acting in the face of negligence on the part of the Union.
Bolsonaro is not committed to maintaining economic activity. He wants more people to crowd, not wear a mask, get infected soon (isn’t that the phrase that he has the best vaccine he himself has, the virus himself?) And the vulnerable will soon die (all one day, right? ). Halfway through, the health system and indescribable suffering collapse – but what does not affect it, immune to empathy.
Psychiatrists in charge of diagnosis and The Hague trying to judge. I’m just sorry that thousands of people have already paid with their lives for this madness. And unfortunately there is much more to come. Make no mistake: whether you like the president or not, the dispute is between Jair Bolsonaro and SARS-CoV-2 versus Rapa. Our survival is at stake.
This column is published in Folha Corrida on Mondays.
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