Brazil in ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ due to Covid: MSF

RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazil’s "failed" response to Covid-19 has driven the country to a "humanitarian catastrophe," Doctors Without Borders said on Thursday, accusing President Jair Bolsonaro’s government of making the health crisis even worse.

"The lack of political will to adequately respond to the pandemic is killing Brazilians in their thousands," the humanitarian group said in a statement. The statement underlined the deadly surge of Covid-19 that has made Brazil the current epicenter of the pandemic.

Last week, the country of 212 million people accounted for 11 percent of infections and 26.2 percent of deaths from Covid-19 worldwide, the group said. In all, the disease has claimed more than 360,000 lives in Brazil, second only to the United States.

"These staggering figures are clear evidence of the authorities’ failure to manage the health and humanitarian crises in the country and protect Brazilians, especially the most vulnerable," it said.

Bolsonaro has long downplayed the pandemic and defied expert advice on measures to contain it, leaving state and local authorities to implement a messy patchwork of response measures.

Doctors Without Borders said the lack of an "effective, centralized and coordinated" response was exacerbating the crisis. "Public health measures have become a political battlefield in Brazil," said Christos Christou, president of the group, which is sometimes referred to with its French acronym MSF.

"As a result, science-based policies are associated with political opinions, rather than the need to protect individuals and their communities." The statement came two days after the Brazilian Senate launched an investigative committee into Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic.

Doctors Without Borders condemned the lack of masks and social distancing in Brazil, which have been "shunned and politicized" even as Bolsonaro and his allies tout medications such as anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, despite studies documenting their ineffectiveness against Covid-19.

"Fuelling sickness and death in Brazil is the overwhelming amount of disinformation," it said. It also condemned the country’s "half-speed" vaccination campaign. The organization, which has operated in Brazil since 1991, has deployed medical teams in eight of Brazil’s 27 states to respond to the pandemic.

Meanwhile, lessons learned during the Covid-19 pandemic should be used to fight the spread of drug-resistant bacteria, which kill tens of thousands of people each year, the World Health Organisation said on Thursday. The UN health agency warned that the world was running out of options for fighting antimicrobial resistance (AMR), with few new effective antibiotics in the pipeline. But it said the coronavirus crisis, which had dramatically deepened global understanding of the health and economic implications of an uncontrolled pandemic, could spur progress.

Covid-19 has taught us "how fast communicable diseases can spread", Henry Skinner, head of the AMR Action Fund, told reporters at a press conference. "We need to have the right drugs available so we are always able to treat these infections and prevent their becoming a pandemic." The worldwide push to rein in the pandemic has proven that rapid progress can be made when there is enough political will, the WHO said.

"Opportunities emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic must be seized to bring to the forefront the needs for sustainable investments in (research and development) of new and effective antibiotics," Haileyesus Getahun, who heads the WHO’s AMR division, warned in a statement.

He said, there should be a global mechanism to pool funding to fight the scourge of antimicrobial resistance, along the same lines as the mechanisms created to fund the development of Covid-19 vaccines.