Foreign Desk Report
BRASILIA: Thousands of people have rallied across Brazil in support of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, whose handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely decried amid a continuing surge in deaths and infections.
Protesters gathered in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and the capital, Brasilia, where thousands assembled on the Esplanade of Ministries as Bolsonaro briefly passed overhead in a helicopter. “It’s a critical moment and Bolsonaro needs the people’s support,” Edvaldo de Paulo, a demonstrator who looked to be in his 60s, told the AFP news agency in Brasilia.
Bolsonaro has continued to downplay the seriousness of COVID-19, dismissing it as just a “little flu” earlier on in the pandemic, and he rejects public health measures such as lockdowns, despite Brazil’s continuing coronavirus crisis.
The South American nation surpassed 400,000 deaths linked to COVID-19 on Friday, the second-highest total in the world after the United States, and it has recorded more than 14.6 million infections to date, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
