A Trump for South America

Because fascists are, among heir countless other faults, always massively incompetent as well as malevolent, the COVID situation in Brazil is incredibly dire:

More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are at their peak and highly contagious variants of the coronavirus are sweeping the nation, enabled by political dysfunction, widespread complacency and conspiracy theories. The country, whose leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has played down the threat of the virus, is now reporting more new cases and deaths per day than any other country in the world.

“We have never seen a failure of the health system of this magnitude,” said Ana de Lemos, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders in Brazil. “And we don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

On Wednesday, the country surpassed 300,000 Covid-19 deaths, with roughly 125 Brazilians succumbing to the disease every hour. Health officials in public and private hospitals were scrambling to expand critical care units, stock up on dwindling supplies of oxygen and procure scarce intubation sedatives that are being sold at an exponential markup.

Intensive care units in Brasília, the capital, and 16 of Brazil’s 26 states report dire shortages of available beds, with capacity below 10 percent, and many are experiencing rising contagion (when 90 percent of such beds are full the situation is considered dire.)

Things are going to get worse before they get better, not least because Bolsonaro is encouraging people to take worse than useless drugs and has created an anti-vaxx culture ex nihlio:

Such conspiracy theories about Covid-19 vaccines have spread widely on social media, including on WhatsApp and Facebook. A recent public opinion poll by the firm IPEC found that 46 percent of respondents believed at least one widely disseminated falsehood about vaccines.

Mistrust of vaccines and science is new in Brazil and a dangerous feature of the Bolsonaro era, said Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian neurologist at Duke University who led a coronavirus task force in the country’s northeast last year.

“In Brazil, when the president of the republic speaks, people listen,” Dr. Nicolelis said. “Brazil never had an anti-vaccine movement — ever.”

But many hard-core supporters of Mr. Bolsonaro, who retains the support of roughly 30 percent of the electorate, argue that the president’s instincts on the pandemic have been sound.

It seems impossible that there could be a country that for whom President Trump would be a modest upgrade but here we are. It’s a sickening tragedy.