Sacked Health Minister lifts lid on Bolsonaro’s Covid-19 response

Acrimoniously sacked as Health Minister in mid-April — and mid-pandemic — Luiz Henrique Mandetta has released a tell-all book covering events between January and April 16, when he was relieved of his duties after prolonged squabbles with President Jair Bolsonaro.

In “Um paciente chamado Brasil” (freely translated as “A Patient Called Brazil”), Mr. Mandetta displays his utter stupefaction with President Bolsonaro’s attitudes during the early weeks and months of the coronavirus epidemic in Brazil — from the conspiracy theories Mr. Bolsonaro used to explain the outbreak, to his denialism of the disease, and “magical” solutions for the virus.

According to the former Health Minister, not only did Jair Bolsonaro publicly belittle the severity of Covid-19, but he also did not show interest in projecting the outcome of the epidemic or issuing protective measures to the population. Neither did he show any empathy for the droves of grieving families who lost loved ones to the disease.

“For [Mr.] Bolsonaro, the solution was always simple: his project to fight the pandemic was to say that the government has the medicine and...