S？O PAULO — A special Senate committee investigating Brazil’s response to the pandemic will accuse President Jair Bolsonaro of committing crimes against humanity for his role in the public health disaster that killed hundreds of thousands of people, a senior lawmaker said Tuesday.

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       A draft version of a report detailing the committee’s findings had included calls for authorities to indict the president, other senior officials and three of his sons on charges of mass murder and genocide against the Indigenous population, whose communities were particularly vulnerable to the virus.

       But the president of the special committee, Sen. Omar Aziz, said Tuesday that senators involved in the probe will remove the genocide and homicide allegations from the report. Aziz said senators would keep in the report accusations of crimes against humanity and the crime of causing an epidemic that led to deaths.

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       Senators in Brazil are preparing to read the final version at a session Wednesday and could vote on its findings as early as next week.

       Brazil has suffered one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks of the pandemic. Its official death toll stands at more than 600,000, second only to the United States.

       A lawmaker who is leading the probe has accused Bolsonaro and other officials of making deliberate decisions that allowed the coronavirus to spread, resulting in unnecessary deaths. Sen. Renan Calheiros, the report’s lead author, said that the document recommends criminal charges against 70 people, including former health minister Eduardo Pazuello.

       The president, the report says, was guided “by an unfounded belief in the theory of herd immunity by natural infection and the existence of a treatment.”

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       Throughout the pandemic, Bolsonaro has downplayed the threat of the virus, flouted public health guidance and urged his supporters to discard masks and treat covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, with unproven drugs such as hydroxychloroquine.

       But few in Brazil believe that the recommendations will lead to a trial of the nation’s most senior officials.

       Bolsonaro has also dismissed the probe as a politically motivated “joke.”

       “Renan Calheiro’s report is a hallucination; it doesn’t stand and it’s disrespectful to all of the 600,000 victims of covid” in Brazil, Flávio Bolsonaro, a politician and son of the president, said in a statement last week.

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       “The allegations against the government and me have no legal basis and don’t even make sense,” he said. “Every vaccine shot in the country, with no exceptions, was purchased by the Bolsonaro administration.”

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       According to Our World in Data, which tracks publicly available figures, more than 73 percent of Brazil’s population has received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.

       Cunningham reported from Washington.

       Read more:

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