RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said on Tuesday, June 8, that he has decided to investigate whether some governors “exaggerated” the number of deaths caused by coronavirus in the country to obtain more resources from the federal government.
The president had already stated on Monday that, according to a report by the Federal Audit Court (TCU), which audits public spending, the number of deaths from Covid-19, which according to official figures reaches almost 475,000, would have been “inflated” by some governors for that purpose and would actually be “50% lower”.
However, the TCU clarified that it had not reported this, to which Bolsonaro said that, even so, “this practice could have occurred”, so he has determined that the Federal Solicitor General’s Office (AGU), which represents the government, should “investigate” whether it was indeed so.
The president, said that “in social networks,” there were “many” messages from people who had “lost relatives” and denounced that doctors attributed these deaths to the coronavirus, when in fact the cause of death was something else.
Regarding the purported TCU report, Bolsonaro later acknowledged that his information was not correct: “I was wrong”, he admitted. However, he cited other pronouncements of that entity warning about the possibility that the numbers of deaths due to Covid-19 were fraudulently “exaggerated”.
Bolsonaro said he was convinced that “this undesirable practice may have occurred” and said that for this reason, he decided that the AGU should investigate “solid indications” which, in his opinion, “exist” in this sense.
According to the president, to “justify” this “super-notification”, some governors insisted on restrictions on economic activities and closures of businesses “and the poorest paid, who ended up losing their income”.
Bolsonaro, who since the beginning of the pandemic has opposed these prevention measures and even criticized the use of masks, added that “the bill” for the alleged abuses of the governors has been paid by “the informal workers”, who number about 38 million in Brazil.