Brazil takes leaf from Trump, threatens to pull out from WHO
- President Jair Bolsonaro, sometimes called a ‘Tropical Trump’, has followed a similar script to the US president in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic
- He has played down the risk of the Covid-19 disease and touted the purported effects of the drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine
“I’m telling you right now, the United States left the WHO, and we’re studying that, in the future. Either the WHO works without ideological bias, or we leave, too,” the far-right leader told journalists outside the presidential palace on Friday.
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Bolsonaro said it was no coincidence that days later, the WHO reversed its decision to suspend clinical testing of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19.
The WHO had suspended trials of the drug after major studies raised concerns about its safety and effectiveness against the new coronavirus – irking Trump, a hydroxychloroquine fan who even took the drug himself as a preventive measure.
On Thursday, most of the authors of the studies that appeared in The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine retracted their work, saying they could no longer vouch for their data after the firm that supplied it refused to be audited.