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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Elected autocrats, their pandemic responses -Patrick Heller

Elected autocrats, their pandemic responses -Patrick Heller

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published Published on Jun 1, 2021   modified Modified on Jun 1, 2021

-The Hindu

In the U.S., India and Brazil, messianic populism, polarisation and insularity have made the pandemic that much worse

A year and counting into the greatest health crisis the world has faced in over a century we can identify one overwhelming factor that separates the countries that have done relatively well from those that have been complete disasters:Autocrcy elected autocrats. By any measure the most dismal performers in the democratic world have been the United States, Brazil and India. Despite its vast wealth and resources and its low population density, the U.S. has one of the highest per capita death tolls in the world. Brazil has taken denialism to new levels and the novel coronavirus pandemic has been allowed to range so fiercely that the country has become a petri dish for new mutations. India’s first wave numbers were relatively mild (even accounting for underreporting) but the current wave is probably the worst and deadliest the world has seen.

The reactions

In all three cases it did not have to be this bad. Former U.S. President Donald Trump took the pandemic as a personal affront, initially refused to come to terms with the threat and wilfully downplayed the gravity of the pandemic. When Washington finally decided to take action, the response was crippled by policy incoherence, partisan attacks on Democratic Governors and open hostility to the scientific community.

Mr. Trump even provided a definition of his autocratic writ declaring in April 2020 that “when somebody’s the President of the United States, the authority is total, and that’s the way it has got to be.”

Brazil’s right-wing populist President, Jair Bolsonaro, who came to office on a platform of being tough on crime and the politically correct, has been called the tropical Trump. He dismissed the pandemic as a “little cold”, boasted that real men had nothing to worry about, attacked public health officials as promoting a hoax and fired health ministers who defied him. Measures to combat the pandemic that have been taken in Brazil have come from governors and mayors and have been met with fierce opposition and public mockery from Mr. Bolsonaro.

Narendra Modi was never an outright COVID denier, and his government did take decisive measures, imposing a nation-wide lockdown in March 2020. But having failed to consult with experts or any of the Chief Ministers that govern India’s federal States, the welfare consequences of the lockdown were severe as tens of millions of urban migrants were forced into a mass exodus back to their villages. The pandemic subsided for some time, but even as experts warned of a second wave driven by new variants, the government celebrated its national triumph over the virus, dragged its feet on vaccinations and forged ahead with large-scale election campaign events and religious festivals even as the second wave surged. But of all the policy failures that have led to calls for the government to resign, none is more egregious or more revealing of Mr. Modi’s indifference than the Government’s decision to stay within its Budget allocations and charge States for vaccines. At the current rate, it will take the world’s largest producer of vaccines more than a year to vaccinate its population.

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The Hindu, 1 June, 2021, https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/elected-autocrats-their-pandemic-responses/article34693069.ece?homepage=true


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