Bolsonaro gets two more days to present test results

A federal judge extended President Jair Bolsonaro’s deadline to disclose his two Covid-19 test results until Saturday evening. The president will have to pay a BRL 5,000 fine for each day that he fails to comply with the decision. The president was tested twice in March — and claimed via twitter that both tests came back as negative, but Mr. Bolsonaro has refused to show the test results, calling it a “private matter.” Bolsonaro’s refusal to show his test results and some reports in March indicating that his first test had come back as positive has led many to question Mr. Bolsonaro’s claims. At least 25 people who were a part of the president’s entourage on a trip to the U.S. in early March subsequently contracted the coronavirus.

As a stalling tactic, the Solicitor General’s Office presented the judge yesterday with a March 18 medical report signed by the presidency’s medical assistant, Marcelo Zeitoune, a specialist in orthopedics and traumatology. In the document, the doctor states that President Bolsonaro “does not represent a sanitary risk of Covid-19 contagion, once he has not demonstrated that he hosts the novel coronavirus.”

In an interview with a radio station in southern Brazil yesterday, President Bolsonaro said he “might have caught this virus in the past, maybe, maybe, and [have] not even felt it.” Two days prior, he had a different stance, though. “You’ve never seen me crawling, with a running nose. I didn’t catch it, damn it. And I don’t lie. I don’t lie.” The president had earlier stated that he was not at risk from the novel coronavirus due to his history as an athlete.

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