The Brazilian president has allocated more than $ 1 billion to produce the COVID-19: NPR vaccine

Brazil, one of the world’s worst-hit countries since the pandemic, is channeling more than $ 1 billion into the production and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, the country’s far-right president, Reuters, said Monday. reported.

President Jair Bolsonaro, who criticized the locking measures and told Brazilians to “stop whining” about the deadly virus, said about $ 1.05 billion would be spent on vaccination.

The announcement comes amid an investigation into Bolsonar’s role in resolving his government’s coronavirus crisis, which has killed more than 421,000 people to date – the second largest number of deaths in the world.

On the first day of testimony last week, former Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta told a Senate committee investigating Bolsonar’s actions that the president “opposed the science-based guidelines of the Ministry of Health to fight the coronavirus pandemic” Folha de S. Paolo reported.

Mandetta fired Bolsonaro in April 2020.

According to a Brazilian newspaper, Mandetta told officials that he had written a letter to the president before being fired, saying social exclusion could help curb the spread of the virus. “It was very embarrassing for the health minister to explain that the health minister was going one way and the president the other way,” he said.

Since the start of the pandemic, Bolsonaro has steadily downplayed the global health crisis and contradicted expert advice on how to slow its spread.

“Enough fuss and whining. How much longer will the crying last?” Bolsonaro said crowd at the March event. “How much longer are you going to stay home and shut everything down? No one can take it anymore. We regret death again, but we need a solution.”

The president led hundreds of motorcyclists at a rally to celebrate Mother’s Day in the capital around Brazil on Sunday. He used the demonstrations to once again ridicule health officials who advocate for social removal measures.

“Let everyone who wants to see people away from me or who hopes to see me away from people, give up,” Bolsonaro wrote in a tweet.

As of May 9, more than 46.8 million doses of COVID-19, Government, have been distributed reported.