Natalia Pasternak: Brazil's battle between science and politics
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 27 August 2020
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The global Covid-19 pandemic has put a fierce spotlight on the relationship between scientists and policy makers. Leaders across the world have responded to the science with everything from respect to scepticism. Foremost amongst the sceptics, president Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, one of the countries hit hardest by the virus. Stephen Sackur speaks to the Brazilian microbiologist Natalia Pasternak who has launched a crusade against her President in the name of science. But is she winning the argument?
(Photo: Microbiologist Natalia Pasternak)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Saka. My guest today is a microbiologist with an impressive record of scientific research. But these days, Natalia Pastinac, is best known in her home country, Brazil, for her media-driven crusade against the country's president, Jaya Bolsonaro, and the name of her cause, |
| 0:22.9 | science. Her demand? That Brazil's policymakers respect the scientific advice about how best to |
| 0:30.5 | protect Brazilians from the COVID-19 pandemic. President Bolsonaro has proved himself to be the |
| 0:36.7 | most skeptical of world leaders, |
| 0:39.3 | famously dismissing COVID as a little flu, flouting social distancing regulations, |
| 0:45.3 | railing against regional lockdown measures, |
| 0:47.3 | and insisting on the efficacy of a treatment dismissed by most scientists. |
| 0:53.1 | Now, as it happens, more than 100,000 Brazilians have been |
| 0:57.2 | killed by the virus, and the infection rate remains alarmingly high in many areas. And yet, |
| 1:03.2 | the president's popularity appears to be undiminished. Have the Brazilian people as a whole |
| 1:08.4 | had their feel of scientific experts telling them what to do? |
| 1:13.4 | Well, Natalia Pasternak joins me now from Sao Paulo. |
| 1:16.9 | Welcome to Hard Talk. |
| 1:18.5 | Let's start with the claim from your president, Jaya Bolsonaro, that the worst of the coronavirus epidemic in Brazil is now over. Would you agree? Of course, not. |
| 1:31.2 | We're still in the middle of it to be, if we're lucky, and the president seems to be completely |
| 1:37.2 | disconnected from reality, really. That's the way he's been behaving from the start. So he has |
| 1:43.8 | no real measure of the dangers and the gravity of this pandemic. |
| 1:48.6 | You talk of the numbers. |
| 1:50.5 | The numbers are horrible. |
| 1:52.2 | More than 116,000 Brazilians dead as a result of coronavirus. |
| 1:57.9 | Well over 3.5 million cases already. But if one looks across the region, |
| 2:03.9 | across Latin America, Brazil is by no means alone here. Countries from Peru to Mexico have suffered |
... |
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