DYER: Deaths due to lack of care will write his epitaph

in Brazil now that most hospitals are rationing care, turning away COVID-stricken people whose age or underlying conditions make them less likely to survive and saving scarce beds and oxygen for those with a better chance.

The death-rate has been truly shocking. Most days last week it was in the high three thousands per day, which is about a third of the world total in a country with only 2.5 per cent of the world’s people.

It’s especially horrifying in a middle-income country with a free national health service which, although it is underfunded, normally provides reasonably good care. Only 11 per cent of the population have received at least one dose of a vaccine, and the latest forecast is for half a million deaths by July.

Even Bolsonaro sometimes wears a mask now, although he continues to take legal action against states that impose stronger anti-pandemic measures like stay-at-home orders. He is a prisoner of his own ideology, even when it is clearly hurting his popular support. And to make matters worse for him, ‘Lula’ is out of jail and free to run against him next year.

Brazil was never more prosperous, especially for the less privileged half of the population, than during Luiz Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva’s two terms as president in 20032011. He then withdrew because of the two-consecutive-term limit, but he would have been free to run against Bolsonaro in 2018 – and he would have won – if he had not been in jail by then.

The judge who sent him to jail later became a member of Bolsonaro’s cabinet, but the Supreme Court has now annulled Lula’s corruption convictions and he’s free to run for president in 2022. Nobody knows how many Brazilians will have died needlessly by then, but probably enough to write Bolsonaro’s political epitaph.