With one of the worst outbreaks in the world rapidly catching up with the state of the American outbreak in Brazil is quite scary. President jair bolsonaro has continually mocked coronavirus as the little flu and despite being ordered by various parts of the Brazilian authorities to wear a mask has continually refused to do so and downplayed the need of those in the public.
This is a bizarre period of supposed populism we’re for some reason under these new rules it is acceptable for president or leaders to deny facts and get away with it. Bolsonaro like trump has demonstrated either a continual desire to lie despite everyone knowing they were lying or a level of science illiteracy that is quite terrifying.
in the modern day and age it should simply not be allowed to state lies that are known to be lies and get away with it.
The UK government is not completely absolved of this, thankfully they haven’t got to the point of lying about scientific facts. It is clear that the brexit campaigning groups in the UK have got away with all the lies they told.
In the UK I for one do not like it when there is a debate in the House of commons that removes itself from fact. A recent attempt to reintroduce lynx to Norfolk wasended by a local MP spouting a load of scientific falsehoods about lynx. He cherry picked studies, and used countries with situations completely different to our own just scare other MPs into blocking the proposal.
I don’t really know how these sorts of things can be dealt with. Jair bolsonaro and Donald trump both have a following which will not listen to reason. However with a short period of time left to recognise the need to do something about global warming it is becoming essential that any elected leader of a country be scientifically literate and not a climate change denier. I struggle to understand how how it now become acceptable to consider politics before you decide how to react a scientific fact- worldwide we need to make this sort of behaviour totally unacceptable and a thing of the past.
Incidentally Bolsonaro has recovered from his illness since this article was written. Despite largely still denying the significance of the illness (after being seriously ill) it is causing chaos in his country. I only hope that his horrendous handling of this will impact his ability to be reelected.