Denouncing a “Statistical coup”, the Brazilian daily Folha de S. Paulo accuses this Monday June 8 in a virulent editorial far-right president Jair Bolsonaro to want ” to choke “ data from Covid-19, “As if he could censor them”.
In open war with the media, the Head of State has unambiguously justified his intention to disseminate the data after the main television news: “There will be no more topic (on official figures) at Jornal Nacional”, he said on Friday evening, quoting TV Globo’s mainstream news.
President Bolsonaro has repeatedly played down the pandemic, calling it “Little flu” and calling for the resumption of economic activities while the curves remain on the rise, with more than 37,000 deaths.
> Follow our live from this Monday, June 8, devoted to the coronavirus pandemic
Since the beginning of last week, the official report of the Ministry of Health, which was made public at 5 p.m. at the start of the health crisis, has not been sent to the press until around 10 p.m.
And as of Friday, the bulletin no longer showed the total number of confirmed cases and deaths, presenting only the figures for the past 24 hours.
– “Worthy of totalitarian regimes” –
Worse still, Carlos Wizard, an entrepreneur approached to occupy a position of high responsibility within the ministry, had announced Friday evening to the newspaper O Globo that the official balance sheet was going to be revised down due to figures. “Fanciful and manipulated”.
A statement that outraged the regional health authorities responsible for compiling the data, which lambasted “An authoritarian, inhuman and unethical attempt to make the coronavirus dead invisible”.
Carlos Wizard denied on Saturday any plans to revise the figures already announced and ended up giving up his job in the ministry on Sunday after calls on the internet to boycott his companies.
“The manipulation of statistics is a maneuver worthy of totalitarian regimes”, Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes launched on Twitter on Saturday.
“This trick will not clear (the government) of the responsibility for a possible genocide”, he added, accompanying his message with the keywords #CensuraNao (no censorship) and #DitaduraNuncaMais (never again a dictatorship).
1,300 or 500 deaths?
Sunday evening, a first assessment of the government sent to the press reported 1,382 deaths in 24 hours, but another published shortly after posted 525 deaths.
The ministry of health, to which the AFP asked which was the good figure and how could justify such a divergence, still had not answered Monday at midday.
“The deliberate confusion of data […] is a lack of respect from citizens and also reveals the authoritarian nature of government “, O Globo daily editor Miriam Leitao said on Monday, calling any manipulation of official figures a “crime”.
– “Parallel reality” –
“From a health standpoint, this is a tragedy that we are witnessing […] Failure to inform means the state is more harmful than the virus “, said Jair Bolsonaro’s former health minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta. He was sacked in April after expressing disagreements with him over the fight against the pandemic..
For several weeks, the Ministry of Health had presented on its official website the daily report with a specious graphics: large characters for the figures of recovered people, and much smaller characters for that of the dead.
“It amounts to creating a parallel reality, as if the company of the Titanic said: ‘we have saved so many people'”, says Tomas Traumann, former communications secretary for the left government of Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016).
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