Brazil’s youngest son, Jair Bolsonaro, was diagnosed with COVID-19, a disease from which the representative recovered last month, the young man announced on his social media this Saturday (15.08.2020).
In a video uploaded today on his Instagram account, Renan Bolsonaro, 22, claimed that he is being treated with hydroxychloroquine, a drug strongly defended by the Brazilian president and to which he attributes his recovery, even though its effectiveness has not yet been scientifically proven.
The young man had released a video e early last May, in which he dismissed the danger of the COVID-19 pandemic, which he called “a story,” and assured that he preferred to “die having sex than coughing.”
So far, the representative, a pandemic denier and one of the most skeptical rulers about the severity of coronavirus in the world, has not commented on his son’s positive diagnosis.
In addition to Renan, Bolsonaro himself and the first lady, Michelle de Paula Firmo, contracted the virus. They also infected with Sars-CoV-2 eight of the 22 ministers of the Brazilian cabinet and 12 of the country’s 27 regional governors.
Brazil, with 210 million inhabitants, is in absolute numbers the second country in the world most affected by the health emergency, behind the United States, and already accumulates more than 106,000 dead and 3.27 million infected by coronavirus.
Meanwhile, a poll reported on Saturday by the Folha newspaper in Sao Paulo revealed that 47% of Brazilians believe that President Bolsonaro is “to blame” for the more than 100,000 deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
By contrast, 41% consider the Brazilian representative “one of the culprits (but not the main one)”, and 11% see him as the “principal responsible” for that balance, the poll noted.
The first results of the survey, conducted on 11 and 12 August based on 2,065 telephone interviews, had already shown on Friday that Bolsonaro remains more popular than ever (37%) since the beginning of his term in 2019, despite criticism from many specialists in his management of the pandemic.
