Not been seen in one. Now on bbc news, hardtalk. Welcome to hardtalk. Im stephen sackur. While some countries are claiming success in their efforts to curb covid 19, brazil is increasingly looking like an outlier. The rate of new infections is still increasing, the death toll is mounting and all the while, president Jair Bolsonaro is focused on reopening the economy and easing social distancing measures. He fired his Health Minister after a series of disagreements and my guest today is that Health Minister, Luiz Henrique mandetta. Is president Jair Bolsonaro putting his nation at risk . Luiz henrique mandetta, welcome to hardtalk. 0k, nice to hearfrom you. Nice to hearfrom england. It is just three weeks or so since you were fired by president bolsonaro. Now that you have had time to reflect on what happened, what are your emotions about it all . Well, that is something that he is in charge, he was elected to hire ministers and fire ministers. He had a view that the economic crisis would be much deeper if everybody would follow the Health Department on keeping distance and staying home. So there was pretty much confusion for the population and he is in charge so he decided to do it. As a citizen now, i am supporting the new minister of health, cheering for him to do a good job and trying to support the best decisions they could make and behaving as a citizen now. But the question is, really, what is going wrong in brazil . We look at the figures today. Well over 100,000 cases of infection according to the official figures, but according to unofficial estimates, the number of infections could be well over1 million. Brazil could have, according to the university of sao paulo medical school, the highest number of infections in the whole world. So what is going wrong . I think that people started theyjust did not want to keep on with staying at home and they decided, well, brazil is a whole continent. We are a very large country with 250 Million People living here. It is natural that we have more cases than small countries like portugal or greece. Brazil is larger than the whole of europe itself, so it is not. It is not not fair to compare brazil to a small country. I understand the point you are making brazil is a very large country with a large population. But perhaps what makes brazil so very different from countries like germany or south korea, who have successfully controlled and curbed covid 19, the difference is that brazil is led by a president , Jair Bolsonaro, who from the very beginning has belittled the danger of covid 19, calling it a little flu, sniffles. But more than that, hes encouraged his people to return to work. He wants to see the lockdown relaxed, the social distancing eased as soon as possible. He goes to rallies without wearing a mask, he makes a point of shaking hands with people, taking selfies, abandoning social distancing. The president himself must bear responsibility, surely . I am sure that history willjudge him because it is exactly as you said. But this is not something that a Society Makes a decision going for only one peoples mind. The press does a wonderfuljob here and we have been watching everything that has been happening around the world since china started releasing the images, but mostly when we saw italy, spain, france and england, when we saw the nurses with bags on their heads to protect themselves, and we saw many politicians dealing with that in a way that they did not know exactly how to balance the health and the economy and even today, this is a challenge for many heads of states all over the world. Bolsonaro made his statement clearly and he decided for the economy, which brought him into collision with my position as a minister of health. But its his right, he is in charge. He was elected. We will have elections in a couple of years so people will be able to judge and say if they understood that or not. I think that we have. But with respect, respect, if i may. We have more than him. We have some governors of states, mayors that also had this behaviour. But the bottom line is, as you just said, bolsonaro is in charge, bolsonaro has set the course and he has delivered the message from the very top. Does mr bolsonaro, in your opinion, have blood on his hands right now . I would not put it this way. It would not help anything in the situation that we have here in brazil right now. I think that the whole country is trying to do its best and the Health Department and also trying to bring a clear message that people have to take care of their parents, grandparents and elderly people and also have to take care of their Health System. He is one voice. He is not the single voice in this country. We have the parliament open, we have the Supreme Court open. All everybody is talking about it and he is one person, and what he says when you look at the polls, people have been very careful to listen just for him. But no doubt that he will be responsible as time goes by. I think that the cases are just starting to get high here. We are now entering the season where we have the respiratory syndromes in the Southern Hemisphere and in brazil, the highest time, season for flu is june, july and august. So we are just getting into the hottest time that we are going to pass through. So i think that his message is very confusing for people. I think that people did not trust as much as we needed them to trust, mainly because of the social aspects of a country that people leave from the city, they leave from what is and the Social Security did not arrive at the right time, but he will take this to his account, no doubt about that. I want to ask a personal question. You had many meetings with him and i wonder why you did not quit sooner. There was a period in march where it seems he was leaving you out of some of the most important meetings about how to handle coronavirus, he was humiliating you in public by completely opposing your message about being strict on social distancing, he was saying forget about it, we need to keep the economy moving. Why didnt you quit sooner . A physician never abandons a patient and that is something that i carry with me. But what i think is that by staying in office and making those statements that the Health Department needed to do, this debate helped many people to make a betterjudgement about whom to follow and how to behave. So i think that this was important for that period of time. They needed to see that there was a different voice about the disease, about the problem of the disease. Right. Well, yeah, you certainly delivered the message that covid i9 needed to be taken seriously and people needed to keep social distance. But are you yourself culpable in one important way . You were the chief at the Health Ministry through the beginnings of the covid i9 response when brazils attitude to testing was woefully inadequate and we look now at the latest figures, which suggest that brazils ability to test its own population for covid i9 is, frankly, pitiful. The United States does more than 30 times the number of tests that brazil does, and that is why the university of sao paulo now believes that not only could you have 1. 5 million cases in the population, which you do not even know about, but they say brazil is going to be the global epicentre of the pandemic and you must share some responsibility for that. Yeah, no doubt. In the beginning, when china released the first cases and the World Health Organization said that it was a problem, it seemed to us here that the virus would be what we call here a heavy virus, a virus that did not have a lot of ability to really spread around. It seemed much more like a sars in 2002 than a virus that would be so capable of spreading to people. So we paid careful attention to how it was spreading around china. We only saw wuhan, the only city where we had cases. All the other cities, even beijing, they did not pass more than 2,000 cases, so it seemed like a virus that could be controlled. Then we saw iran and the whole damage to their Health System, we said, come on, they are under a severe economic blockage so maybe it is just the way things went there. But when we saw italy and france, when we saw spain and england, and then we paid attention to the United States and the United States, mr trump was very comfortable in saying he would take care of that, we really thought he had some kind of science that would be released soon. But then we saw new york going down, we saw california and florida go down, chicago going down, and since the beginning, we were trying to buy things, but you are a rich country. Europe is a rich country. The us private sectorjust went inside this market and they brought everything, masks and they took from one country to another the masks, the ventilators, everything that you would need to buy from china. China was closed almost 35 days in the beginning and theyjust did not sell. So we started to produce the tests here, but it is not only producing, it is the capability of the logistics and having the machines to read the tests, so even the machines to buy and bring them into the country was hard. But we arranged by the paho, which is the Pan American Health organisation, to get 12 million tests, pcr rt and 10 million tests that we could purchase in china. But mr mandetta. But we kept kept close attention on how england was doing and this kind of testing everybody was not the goal in the beginning. The question now, given where brazil is today with the possibility, given the failure of testing, the possibility that you already have 1. 5 Million People infected and you have a president who is asking for the economy to be opened up for social distancing to be relaxed, the question is, how bad could it get . What is your feeling . Well, it could get as bad as the virus is going to spread all over the country. In the Health System there is no Health System in the world that is able to take care of people at the same time going inside intensive care units. This is how bad its going to be. But what were going to watch is different cities, different stages, different places in brazil, and different times of this epidemic curve. We have down in the south in brazil we have sao paulo and rio de janeiro. Rio dejaneiro is going to have a terrible time in the next two or three weeks, because its rising up. And rio is such a city that you have the seashore and the mountains, and its people are very crowded to each other. Even in a social way, to do social distancing is almost impossible in rio. So were going to watch different cities, different people. Mr mandetta, if i may interrupt forjust a second on that question of rio you say it is going to get terrible. I read in the Brazilian Press yesterday that there were scenes of crowds of people eating barbecue food outside, without any social distancing, other crowds gathering outside metro stations. It seems that brazilians, taking their lead from the president , are not taking social distancing seriously anymore, and that may lead to a national catastrophe. What can be done about it . Well, we have to alert, we have to talk, we have to speak. In rio, you have the governor, you have the mayor. And they have responsibility, because the Supreme Court decided that the responsibility to make the social distance work is from governors and mayors, that they are the ones that have they have the responsibility to do it. What we see in rio is such such a socialfigure that the favelas, i will call the slums its very hard. Its one of the cities with the largest numbers of tuberculosis. So, when you get a respiratory virus inside of it, thats going to be very, very hard to deal with it. And we have been this is not from now. This is something that rio should have worked better since forever. So we are going to face very, very high prices for things that we didnt do in the past, and that youre really going to need it now. We have some good things besides that. 0ur Health System is the best system that stopped smoking in the last 30 years. Only 8 of the Brazilian Society smokes, which is a big difference from the european societies. Lets see if that plays any role. In those favelas, you have very young people, so lets see how is that going to work with them. But its really going to be a very high level of stress in rio, which is a pity. And i want to ask about one other location, and that is the state of amazonas, and in particular, manaus, the biggest city in that amazon region. The mayor there has said that right now he feels like hes watching a horror movie. There are not enough spaces in the cemetery for all of the dead. And those people, activists who represent the Indigenous Peoples of the amazon, say that they fear there is going to be a de facto genocide of Indigenous Peoples. Is the brazilian government, in essence, saying it doesnt really care or it doesnt care enough about the suffering of the Indigenous Peoples . Because it seems the resources are simply not there to help these people. Well, that is not true. The amazon is larger than europe, and people there have been living, and you have different ages and different societies you have people that have been really living where they started their lives, since ever. And brazil is one of the countries that most spends money on help for indians. We have helicopters, aeroplanes, we have physicians, we have nurses. We have a Health System that is devoted for the indians. But the problem is that this disease is very hard. You have people that go inside those places where they live, religious people, people that work for mining, people that go for non governmental organisations, they go there to try to help them and really expose them to the virus. And indians since europeans arrived here, the respiratory virus, like another virus like measles and mumps, they really made a big damage to indians. We are trying to keep them as isolated as we can. Then you have the indians that live in towns and they go back and forth. They go to their villages and they go to town. Those are the hardest ones to take care of because they have to go inside the Health System of the city, and sometimes they dont understand or they dont even understand what is written. It is very hard, but you have a Health System that really is really devoted to them. But the virus, for indians, has always been a very, very hard task for them to pass through. Right. Weve discussed the Health Emergency in brazil. Before we finish we dont have much time, but before we finish, i want to ask you a couple of quick questions about the bigger picture. One is about the economy. President bolsonaros message, when he says we have to get back to work, we have to ease the social distancing, we have to focus now on brazils economy. He says the people are desperate to get back to work, state governors should stop calling for the strict lockdown. He says the destruction ofjobs by some governors in this country is irresponsible and unacceptable, and were all going to pay a higher price for it. Do you think he is right to, in essence, put economic priorities at the top of the agenda right now despite the healthcare crisis . No, i think he is completely wrong. Thats why i was fired i put lives first. And i think that if we would be able to keep a better a better way to take care of people, the economy would respond much easier in our near future. But if we keep doing this kind of message, and people decided to go to work and try to survive anyway, because the president is saying so, were probably going to have a very deep health crisis, which is going to make the economic crisis be even deeper. So we will see what is going to happen. What we have to do now, the whole community, the press and the Health People from science we are all talking with people and giving the message that, listen, its better to slow down a little bit. Lets pass through in a very slow motion, and then we will recover the economy, which is going to be something that the world will have to do. The world will have to sit around a table and try to figure out a new way for economies to work. 0therwise, were going to have the damage of this virus will be much longer than humanity needs to. So i have been working on the post coronavirus crisis, trying to figure how the world is going to work. Not only the Health System, but also the economy, also the relations that were going to have, that were going to have to build in a different agenda. But i think that he is wrong, yes. You say he is wrong. When he fired you, you said he hasntjust fired me, hes actually fired science. Since then, we have also had the Justice Minister announce his resignation because of political interference from the president. There is a sense of political crisis in brasilia right now, and many of his critics are saying that bolsonaro isnt fit for office, he should be impeached, that he is endangering the country. Do you believe that . Well, we have a democratic society. And the impeachments were done in brazil twice in the last 30 years for different reasons. As soon as as long as we have this kind of situation, we have a free parliament, a free society, i think that people are going to do what they have to do. But i really think that things are working. The democratic system although we have this kind of noise, the democratic system is working pretty well. A free press, freedom of speech. The parliament is open, the senate is open, the Supreme Court is working. Imean. But, mr mandetta, you said the system is working. But in the meantime, thousands and thousands of brazilians are going to die of covid 19, and many will say they are dying unnecessarily, because of a failure of leadership at the top. Surely, that is reason enough to question whether bolsonaro should continue in office. Yes, if we were in a Parliamentary Political system, like you have there, probably that would solve in a political way. And brazil is not. We have elections each four years, and to have an impeachment, you really have to have a really well documented crime, or Something Like that, and even have the political vote for it. But what i think this is. For this time, its not the best time to discuss that. We have a higher and very strong enemy to deal with, which is the coronavirus in the Brazilian Society. And thats where all of our energy has to be. Well talk about politics later. Now, we really need everybody to help. Even you, from bbc, by doing this interview, is helping a lot, and i appreciate what youre doing. Luiz henrique mandetta, i thank you very much indeed forjoining me from brasilia. Thanks a lot. Thank you, thank you. Hello again. Weve got another few cool days coming our way before the weather turns milder as we head into the weekend. Now, at the moment, the satellite picture shows cloud in france. Thats been bringing some extreme falls of rain here. Satellite pictures to the north of the uk, where our eye is coming from, shows a lot of cloud working into scotland. That cloud is bringing showers at the moment, and theyll continue over the next few hours as well, mostly across northern scotland. Elsewhere, its largely dry. Quite a bit of cloud for eastern areas. It stays quite breezy as well, and that should keep the temperatures for the most part above freezing. But with lighter winds and clearer skies in wales, parts of the midlands and south west england, these are the areas where were most likely to see temperatures drop low enough to give us some frost to start the day on tuesday. Now, High Pressures still influencing the weather on tuesday, but weve got this cold front diving southwards into scotland as the day goes by. So, for many of us, a bright start to the day. Therell be some sunshine around. It tends to turn a bit cloudier through the day, and there is a risk of a few showers working into perhaps North Western areas of england and wales. But, at the same time, weve got this cold front bringing rain and probably a bit of snow into parts of scotland. Northern ireland, england and wales, temperatures 11 13 degrees, but through the afternoon, as that cold front works southwards, we get colder air, 5 6 celsius. The rain turning to snow for a time. Wintry showers follow for shetland and 0rkney. It will be a colder day for these far Northern Areas than it was compared with monday. High pressure is still there on wednesday, but eventually, its going start to bring in a more of a north westerly flow of air. So eventually, it starts to turn a bit milder, but the cold air still filters its way southwards down the north sea. So, wednesday, these northerly winds probably bringing a slight drop in temperatures to parts of eastern england, and again, there will be some bright whether around. Probably turning quite cloudy for a time during the afternoon. Its across Western Areas that well start to see the temperatures begin to lift a little bit, with highs up to 15 degrees in cardiff and plymouth, and maybe 12 or so in glasgow. As we head towards the end of the week and the weekend, High Pressure keeps the mainly dry weather. Eventually, though, starts to decline, and we get these weather fronts just toppling in across the north of the High Pressure, bringing some thicker cloud, and that will ultimately bring the threat of rain this weekend to parts of scotland. But for most of us, it will be turning milder this weekend. This is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. Im sally bundock. Boris johnson urges people to use common sense, as he defends his plan to relax the lockdown in england President Trump takes questions on testing after white house staff test positive for coronavirus. Israels strategy of using surveillance to help lower the infection rate ca uses c0 ntrove rsy. Critics say its an invasion of privacy. And positive signs that some professional sports may be able to resume play in the near future, but questions remain over how to keep games safe for all