\n Counties that voted for Brazil's pandemic-skeptic President Jair Bolsonaro had substantially higher Covid-19 death rates than those that didn't, the authors of a new study said Thursday.\n<\/p>\n
\n The study, which compared voting results in Brazil's 2018 presidential election in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais with county-level Covid-19 infection and mortality rates, found the disease hit harder in areas that voted for the far-right president, who has regularly clashed with expert advice on fighting the pandemic.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"Bolsonaro has denied Covid-19 severity, promoted treatments without evidence of efficacy, and discouraged social distancing, the use of masks, local lockdowns and other protective measures,\" said co-author Carlos Starling of the Minas Gerais Society of Infectious Disease Specialists.\n<\/p>\n
\n That \"has likely resulted in higher infection rates and deaths from Covid-19 among his supporters,\" he added in a statement.\n<\/p>\n
\n The study, which analyzed data from January 21 to November 10 last year, found infection rates were 30 percent higher in counties where then-candidate Bolsonaro won in 2018 -- 7,600 per 100,000 inhabitants, on average.\n<\/p>\n
\n Death rates were 60 percent higher there, it found -- 212 per 100,000, on average.\n<\/p>\n
\n Covid-19 has claimed more than 660,000 lives in Brazil, second only to the United States in absolute numbers.\n<\/p>\n
\n However, the weekly death toll has fallen dramatically with 75 percent of Brazil's 213 million people now fully vaccinated -- despite repeated anti-vaccine comments from Bolsonaro.\n<\/p>\n
\n Starling and bioinformatics expert Braulio Couto will present the still-unpublished study this month at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in Lisbon, whose selection committee peer-reviewed their findings.\n<\/p>\n
\n It echoed the results of a similar study published in March in medical journal The Lancet, which compared Brazil's 2018 election results nationwide with Covid-19 death rates and also found counties that voted for Bolsonaro fared worse in the pandemic.\n<\/p>\n
\n Bolsonaro, who comes up for reelection in October, has faced damaging criticism over his handling of the virus he dismissed as a \"little flu.\" A Senate commission last October recommended he face criminal charges, including crimes against humanity, for his response to the pandemic.\n<\/p>\n
\n The government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Counties that voted for Brazil's pandemic-skeptic President Jair Bolsonaro had substantially higher Covid-19 death rates than those that didn't, the authors of a new study said Thursday. The study, which compared voting results in Brazil's 2018 presidential election in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais with county-level Covid-19 infection and mortality rates, found the disease […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-90847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n