SAO PAULO (REUTERS) – Almost half of Brazilians think President Jair Bolsonaro bears “no responsibility at all” for the country’s more than 100,000 dead from the coronavirus pandemic, the world’s second highest death toll, according to a new Datafolha poll.

The poll was published on Saturday (Aug 15) in Brazil’s Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper and says 47 per cent of Brazilians do not assign him any blame for the body count, whereas 11 per cent do.

Brazil has the world’s worst outbreak outside of the United States and Bolsonaro’s response to the pandemic has been widely condemned by health experts.

Right-wing Bolsonaro has pushed for the use of an unproven anti-malarial drug to fight the disease, replaced health ministers who opposed his agenda, encouraged Brazilians to oppose lockdown measures and shown indifference to the rising death toll.

Results from the same polling sample released on Friday showed that Bolsonaro currently enjoys the highest popularity rating of his administration, which began in 2019.

Thirty-seven per cent of Brazilians rated his term as great or good, compared with 32 per cent in June.

The poll said that the spike in popularity can be explained by emergency payments the government has been making to low-income and informal workers set to expire in September. The government is currently considering whether to extend the payments.

As of Friday, Brazil had 106,523 deaths and 3,275,520 confirmed cases.

Datafolha interviewed 2,065 people Aug 11-12, and the poll has a margin of error of two percentage points up or down.

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