“We are living in a war of extermination, a biological war that is out of control.”
The evaluation is by the physician and neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, full professor at Duke University, in the United States. He, who coordinated the Scientific Committee of the Northeast Consortium for combating coronavirus, spoke to UOL on Tuesday (9), together with the microbiology and founder of the Instituto Questão de Ciência, Natália Pasternak, and with the infectious disease physician, dean of the ABC Medical School and former coordinator of the Coronavirus Contingency Center in the State from São Paulo, David Uip.
On the same Tuesday, the country broke the record for deaths recorded in 24 hours: 1,954. This is the 48th consecutive day with a moving average of deaths above one thousand. So far there have been 268,568 victims.
Nicolelis, one of the most prestigious Brazilian scientists, compares this moment to that of a war – which is being lost.
“The country is under siege. It is like the Battle of Stalingrad [cidade soviética bloqueada pelos nazistas na Segunda Guerra], with the enemy surrounding the country. Our human resources are being destroyed by the virus, we have a record of loss of health professionals, a record of pregnant women dying of covid. Our army is out of ammunition – which is called a vaccine. The daily supplies to keep the war alive, our defense of the last bastion of national sovereignty, which are medicines, are disappearing. “
To UOL, he said that he was criticized for making an estimate considered conservative: that the country could reach, until the end of March, 3 thousand deaths in a single day. “We could have 500 thousand people killed by the end of the year. We are entering the territory of genocide”, he evaluates.
Miguel Nicolelis argues that if the federal government does not enact a lockdown At the national level, the National Congress and the Supreme Federal Court have to assume the vacuum, enact tutelage by the Ministry of Health and guarantee financial resources so that people can stay at home. What includes a value of emergency aid greater than what is being discussed by the government Jair Bolsonaro. “We are looking to offer R $ 250, R $ 300 for people to die of hunger at home.”
He warned that, after a sanitary collapse, Brazil could also go through a funerary collapse, with cities unable to deal with the death toll. “Secondary bacterial infections start to appear, groundwater is contaminated. And when you have such a breakdown, there is no going back,” he says.
And he criticized the entrepreneurs who fight against the closure of economic activities, warning that, with the worsening of the pandemic and the collapse of the sanitary situation, they will have no one to sell to, losing customers inside and outside the country.
Brazil could become a ‘big soup of variants’
The doctor in microbiology and founder of the Institute of Science, Natália Pasternak, made harsh criticisms of the lack of coordination of national efforts to combat the coronavirus.
“In Brazil, there is no way to remove the President of the Republic except by impeachment. In the United States, there is the 25th amendment of the Constitution, which provides that if the vice and the cabinet, in the majority, decide that the president is unfit for office. government, he is destitute. More unfit than the current president, we don’t have “, he said.
She says that it is necessary for governors to organize each other because it will not come from the federal government. “If we do nothing, the risk is that we become a big ‘soup of variants’. Because without vaccines in adequate quantity and without measures of containment and without coordination, we will have the virus running wild. The greater the replication, the greater the the likelihood of mutations that may bring advantages to the virus “, he explains.
But he warns that what caused the calamitous situation we are in is not the Brazilian variant of the coronavirus, on the contrary: it is a consequence of the calamitous situation.
“We are more likely to have more variants and not be able to control and to become a major outcast in the world, with geopolitical, economic and tourism losses. We will not be able to enter other countries, people will not want to come to Brazil”, he warns . “And we become a health threat to the world. Because there is a country the size of ours that does not control the pandemic, the world does not control the pandemic.”
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