CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has rapidly changed his tune on the Coronavirus outbreak over the last few weeks, after initially dismissing the pandemic as ‘just a little flu’.
Since his initial attempts at denying the seriousness of the situation, Brazil has recorded over 650,000 cases of COVID-19 and 34,000 deaths related to the illness, the third-highest number in the world, just ahead of Italy.
It is for this reason that Bolsonaro has ordered all Brazilian hospitals and medical providers to stop the official COVID-19 death count.
This response mirrors that of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who initially opted for the herd immunity model of dealing with the crisis, right up until he was placed on a ventilator in an ICU bed alongside the 40,000 British citizens who weren’t lucky enough to survive the illness.
US President Donald Trump has also put his country through similar grievances, after turning the virus into a partisan issue, and telling his voters that it was a Democrat hoax aimed at making him look bad.
At last count, close to 120,000 Americans had died of COVID-19.
Russian President Vladimir Putin also makes the list of leaders elected through the cult of personality and voter suppression, with Russia now at half a COVID-19 million cases – placing them at number three most affected countries behind the US and Brazil.
While these same ‘modern conservative’ world leaders that have been elected off the back of social media populism attempt to point the finger at China for masterminding the outbreak, Australians are less inclined to blame the origin of the virus for the poorly handled pandemic that followed.
As was highlighted in November last year, Australian voters are all too aware of this now very visible trend of rich white boys who go missing when they are supposed to be leading a country out of a crisis.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, while lucky to have avoided a full blown COVID-19 epidemic in own country due to the impenetrable ocean borders, was also accused of hiding during the 2019 Climate Fires.
‘Scotty From Marketing’ as he is commonly known even went as far as whisking his family away for a week long Hawaiian holiday while firefighters, rural communities and over a billion native animals perished in the blaze.
As Boris Johnson now begins to consider quarantining the steady stream of overseas arrivals, just three months into the outbreak, and Donald Trump begins sending in the military to diffuse the civil unrest that has escalated rapidly over the last week – Planet Earth appears to have to noticed that the loudest and richest members of the global political class also appear to be the most incompetent leaders in times where political action is required.
At time of press, the UK, US, Russia and Brazil were accountable for 49% of all the 7,091,667 COVID-19 cases on the planet.
