If Brazil continues to let COVID rage unchecked, it risks deadly new variants emerging to threaten the global community, a Duke University neuroscientist in Brazil told The Guardian.
Miguel Nicolelis urged the international community to put pressure on the Brazilian government, which has made little effort to manage its COVID outbreak which has so far left a quarter of a million Brazilians dead. Brazil’s COVID deaths amount to one tenth of the world’s total.
“The world must vehemently speak out over the risks Brazil is posing to the fight against the pandemic,” said Nicolelis who has spent much of the lockdown in his São Paulo flat.
“What’s the point in sorting the pandemic out in Europe or the United States, if Brazil continues to be a breeding ground for this virus?”
He said: “It’s that if you allow the virus to proliferate at the levels it is currently proliferating here, you open the door to the occurrence of new mutations and the appearance of even more lethal variants.”
Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon, has already seen the emergence of a deadly, highly transmissible variant, P1, six cases of which have been detected in the UK already. The new variant with its “unique constellation of mutations” may also evade immunity, scientists have warned.
“Brazil is an open-air laboratory for the virus to proliferate and eventually create more lethal mutations,” Nicolelis said. “This is about the world. It’s global.”
The warning comes as hospitals around Brazil are on the verge of collapse, with a record 1726 daily deaths recorded on Tuesday.
“We’ve now gone past 250 000 deaths, and my expectation is that if nothing is done we could have lost 500 000 people here in Brazil by next March. It’s a horrifying and tragic prospect, but at this point it’s perfectly possible,” he said.
Nicoleis puts the blame squarely upon Brazil’s far right President Jair Bolsonaro. “The policies that he is failing to put into practice jeopardise the fight against the pandemic in the entire planet.”
José Gomes Temporão, who was the health minister during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, said Bolsonaro and others would have to be held accountable for their poor response.
“To this day, Brazil doesn’t have a national plan to combat COVID,” Temporão complained, criticising Bolsonaro’s failure to secure sufficient vaccines for Brazil.
“I don’t think there is any other leader who is so obtuse, so backward, who has such a mistaken and warped vision of reality as the president of Brazil,” Temporão said. “History will condemn these people.”
Source: The Guardian
