JUDY WOODRUFF: Brazil's Supreme Court formalized a criminal investigation last week into President
Jair Bolsonaro's handling of the pandemic. It could eventually lead to his impeachment.
At the same time, Brazil's death toll from COVID-19 continues to spiral out of control.
The country just passed 400,000 fatalities since the beginning of the pandemic, with
no significant slowdown in sight.
With support from the Sloan Foundation, special correspondent Simon Ostrovsky and producer
Charles Lyons bring us the first of two reports.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: With a universal health care system, a long history of successful mass
vaccination campaigns, and the delayed arrival of the coronavirus to its shores in 2020,
Brazil had ample expertise and time to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic.
These are the grim scenes unfolding in hospitals around South America's most populous nation,
as they reach the point of collapse, crowded waiting rooms and crowded ICUs, a medical
staff that's barely able to keep up.
The situation in this municipal hospital in Sao Paulo is typical of the situation in hospitals
around the region and around the country. This is a neighborhood hospital. Originally,
it had just seven ICU beds, but they have increased that to 94; 94 beds isn't nearly
enough.
DR. MAURICIO BESKOW, Hospital Municipal Tide Setubal: The symptoms are much worse, much
faster. And we have almost 50 percent of the patients are below 50 years. That didn't happen
last year.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: Dr. Mauricio Beskow staffs the hospital's newest COVID ward with 20 ICUs.
He told "NewsHour" it was the worst medical catastrophe he'd witnessed over his 20-year
medical career.
DR. MAURICIO BESKOW: This hospital is 100 percent COVID. So, it's very high. It's very
high. The disease is terrible.
The disease is very, very hard on the patients. They die very quickly sometimes. Sometimes,
two or three days, and they are dead. And the family, I think, it's the worst part,
because, at the moment the patient comes into the hospital, the family can't see the patient
anymore at all.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: From big cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, to remote river
communities along the Amazon, over 400,000 Brazilians have died of COVID since the pandemic
began here last year.
It's a death toll second only to the United States. Many Brazilians blame this man, the
country's right-wing populist leader, Jair Bolsonaro. Here he is speaking in November,
just as the disastrous second wave was getting under way.
JAIR BOLSONARO, Brazilian President (through translator): Everything is about the pandemic
nowadays. We have to stop with this. I'm sorry for the dead. I'm sorry, but we're all going
to die one day. Everybody here is going to die. We have to stop being a country of sissies.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: Marcia Castro is a Brazilian researcher and chair of the department of
Global Health and Population at Harvard's Chan School of Public Health.
MARCIA CASTRO, Harvard University: The president of Brazil was very similar to what Donald
Trump used to be when he was the president. They both denied the importance of the virus.
They both completely ignored science.
They both had behavior of going out, hanging out with people, shaking hands not using masks,
so completely against what had to be done. And they also were both against lockdowns.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: The country's top leadership allowed the virus to spread unhindered in
the name of the economy and with the belief that so-called herd immunity could end the
pandemic.
MARCIA CASTRO: It was a sequence of mistakes that accumulated and end up with what we're
seeing now, many more deaths than we should see and hospitals not about to collapse, but
completely collapsed already.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: The city of Manaus, deep in the Amazon, was where the health system
collapsed first and hardest. It became so overwhelmed that doctors ran out of oxygen,
and many COVID patients simply suffocated to death.
According to Jorge Kalil, the head of clinical immunology and allergy at the University of
Sao Paulo School of Medicine, it became a breeding ground for a new highly infectious
variant called P.1.
JORGE KALIL, University of Sao Paulo School of Medicine: In Manaus, for instance, we had
many people that had already the disease, so we had partial immunity. When you have
partial immunity, you can select mutants that have a better adherence to the receptor or
can escape from the immune response.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: The idea that herd immunity could provide a population with protection
was disproven disastrously here.
David Almeida only been the mayor of Manaus for a few months. When the virus encountered
a large number of people who had previously been infected in his city, it evolved to become
even more deadly.
DAVID ALMEIDA, Mayor of Manaus, Brazil (through translator): At the peak of the pandemic,
we were burying more than 200 people a day.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: What lesson does Manaus have to teach the world about the effectiveness
of the so-called herd immunity concept?
DAVID ALMEIDA (through translator): The emergence of a new variant happened exactly because
of the great proliferation of the virus, in which the virus became more resistant to the
treatment. There are only two paths to solving the pandemic issue, social distancing and
vaccination
SIMON OSTROVSKY: But Brazil is lagging behind the rest of the world. One of the reasons
is Brazil's president, who was offered 70 million Pfizer doses last summer and declined
to sign a contract, alleging that the American pharmaceuticals giant refused to take responsibility
for potential side effects.
JAIR BOLSONARO (through translator): If you turn into a crocodile, it is your problem.
If you turn into Superman, if a woman grows a beard or a man starts speaking in a high
voice, they want nothing to do with it.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: Only now, over a year into the pandemic, has the Brazilian government
joined the global scramble for vaccines. The change of heart came as Bolsonaro's popularity
plummeted, as tens of thousands of graves are being added to cemeteries like this one.
With space running out, gravediggers who can barely keep up with the pace exhume older
bones to make way for the deluge of COVID dead here in Sao Paulo. Even so, there are
still millions of Bolsonaro supporters who seem fazed by nothing. They argue that the
lockdowns hurt the economy and that the science behind mask-wearing is unproven, echoing rhetoric
that the president himself has used throughout his tenure.
PATRICK FOLENA, Bolsonaro Supporter: We are a poor country, a lot of people dying, starving,
in starvation, because we need to work. Everybody needs to work here. It's sad to see what's
going on in the economy in Brazil.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: Patrick Folena is a self-described investor who spoke to me at a small protest
camp in Sao Paulo that was set up by supporters of the president.
I have got to ask you, why aren't you wearing a mask?
PATRICK FOLENA: I'm not afraid. I respect. I use the mask inside the building.
DR. MAURICIO BESKOW: People don't seem to understand the severity of the disease. They
still are going shopping. They're partying and outside in the streets, don't even use
a mask. But they don't see what we see here. The patients are suffering a lot.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: Professor Kalil said he fears what happened in Manaus could lethally repeat
in cities across Brazil if large numbers of immunized people drop their guard and re-encounter
the virus, giving it the opportunity to mutate again.
JORGE KALIL: The vaccines that we have so far, mostly based on the original spike protein
with no variants. If you have mutations, you are going to lose some of the targets.
It's a kind of war. You have your ammunition, and then you have the enemy. Sometimes, the
ammunition is not enough for the enemy. Sometimes, it is.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: That's why it's important for vaccine rollouts to happen as quickly
as possible. Brazil was once a country that led the world through its accessible and universal
health system. No longer.
MARCIA CASTRO: Brazil has a national immunization program that has also been recognized internationally
as being extremely well-designed. When we had the threat of H1N1, Brazil vaccinated
80 million people in three months.
So, Brazil knows how to do it. They have the network across the country to do it. We just
need the vaccines.
SIMON OSTROVSKY: For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Simon Ostrovsky in Sao Paulo.