Brazil president leads bike rally through city

Bolsonaro (centre) acknowledges the crowd as he heads a motorcade rally in Rio de Janeiro.

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro led a motorbike rally through Rio de Janeiro yesterday as throngs gathered amid the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic to cheer him on. The far-right leader was accompanied by a substantial security detail at the head of several thousand motorbikes that was screened live on the president’s official Facebook page. The parade comes as Bolsonaro has tried to galvanise his support base at a time when his popularity has sunk to its lowest since he took over the presidency in January 2019, and with the latest opinion polls putting him behind former president Lula ahead of next year’s election. A Senate commission is investigating his pandemic management with 450,000 people having died of Covid-19. On Friday the senator leading the upper house’s inquiry into the government’s handling of the crisis said that Bolsonaro never wanted to buy Covid-19 vaccines and originally bet on herd immunity beating the coronavirus. In an interview, Senator Renan Calheiros said it is too early to say if Bolsonaro had committed any criminal offence in his management of the public health crisis, and that more investigation is required. “I think everything points in that direction,” he said, regarding Bolsonaro’s preference for herd immunity. “The president first denied the disease, called it a flu, and then argued against social isolation and lockdown. Then he played down the use of masks and encouraged crowds to gather,” Calheiros said. “Why is that? Because of herd immunity, the natural immunity ... you have to encourage crowds and the spread of the virus.” “This is why he never wanted a vaccine,” Calheiros said of Bolsonaro, noting that the president was slow in spending billions of dollars given to him by Congress earlier in the pandemic to buy vaccines from overseas. Herd immunity occurs when a large portion of a given population achieves immunity to a disease, sometimes through widespread infection, thereby reducing the chances of person-to-person spread. The president’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Calheiros is a veteran lawmaker and Bolsonaro critic. Yesterday’s rally started at the 2016 Rio Olympic Park and lasted an hour and half while heading along the city’s iconic beaches, Ipanema and Copacabana. Supporters lining the route cheered on the president and waved Brazilian flags. About half an hour into the parade, the motorbikes stopped for a few minutes while Bolsonaro, wearing a helmet but no face mask, stood on his machine and waved to the crowds, who chanted “legend” back at him as engines were revved. On Friday, Bolsonaro was fined by a northeastern state government “for the promotion in Maranhao of gatherings with no sanitary safeguards”. Bolsonaro had handed out rural property titles in front of throngs of maskless people at an event in a town in Maranhao state, where gatherings of more than 100 people are banned. Bolsonaro’s office has two weeks to appeal, after which the amount of the fine will be set. At the end of April, Bolsonaro said he was waiting for “a sign from the people” to put an end to the pandemic restrictions taken locally by mayors and governors to try to slow the virus spread, insinuating that he could even deploy the army. Since then, pro-Bolsonaro demonstrations have taken place every weekend with no hint of social distancing. Brazil has recorded nearly 16mn cases of Covid-19 and nearly 450,000 deaths, the second-highest death toll in the world after the United States.