Brazil could have stopped 400,000 Covid deaths with better response, expert says

Epidemiologist behind study on scale of disaster says Jair Bolsonaro’s government is ‘entirely’ responsible

Flávia Milhorance in Rio de Janeiro
Tue 29 Jun 2021 10.00 BST

Brazil could have saved 400,000 lives if the country had implemented stricter social distancing measures and launched a vaccination programme earlier, according to an eminent epidemiologist who is leading the first study to quantify the scale of the country’s Covid disaster.

Such policies would have prevented 80% of the half a million Covid deaths registered in one of the hardest-hit countries in the world, said Pedro Hallal, a professor at the Federal University of Pelotas.

“The responsibility for these numbers is entirely on the federal government’s back –and particularly on the president’s,” Hallal told the Guardian.

“It was not the federal government who said that the pandemic was a ‘little flu’. It was not the government that encouraged people to go out without a mask, or who said that the vaccine could turn you into an alligator. That was all the president, and it’s his responsibility,” Hallal said.

Hallal said that the Covid-19 mortality average was more than four times higher in Brazil than the rest of world – 2,345 per million in Brazil versus 494 globally.

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