Brazilian government has been accused of totalitarianism and censorship after it stopped releasing its total numbers of COVID-19 cases, deaths and also deleting other data from the ministry of health’s official website.
Health ministry told local media the move was ordered by President Jair Bolsonaro but it was met with widespread outrage in Brazil, one of the world’s worst-hit COVID-19 hotspots, the Guardian reports.
Reacting to the move, Alberto Beltrame, president of Brazil’s national council of state health secretaries, in a statement said;
The authoritarian, insensitive, inhuman and unethical attempt to make those killed by Covid-19 invisible will not succeed. We and Brazilian society will not forget them, nor the tragedy that befalls the nation.
As of Sunday evening, Brazil recorded 672,846 coronavirus cases, making it the second country with the highest number of infections after the US (2,012,019) and third highest fatalities after the US (112,596) and UK (40,597).
Brazil recorded its first COVID-19 case on February 26, 2020 — a day before Nigeria recorded its index case.
Nigeria has since recorded 354 deaths, while Brazil has over 37,000 fatalities.
According to the Guardian, Brazil on Thursday recorded 1,473 coronavirus deaths, which was more than the 1,440 casualties required to make an average of one death for every minute of that day.
On Friday night, Brazil’s government stopped releasing the cumulative numbers of confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths in its daily bulletin but only provided daily numbers.
The health ministry’s website was also taken offline and came back online on Saturday after deleting the total number of deaths, total confirmed cases, numbers of cases under investigation and recovered cases.
The death counts were reported as 904 on Saturday, 1,005 on Friday and 1,473 on Thursday.
The move has been widely criticized across Brazilian society, with doctors, medical associations and state governors tagging the newly adopted approach an attempt to control information.
Federal prosecutors announced an investigation on Saturday and gave the interim health minister 72 hours to explain the move, using the Brazilian constitution and freedom of information law as justification.
