Three Leaders Downplayed Covid and Ended Up Catching It
- Trump joins Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and U.K.’s Boris Johnson
- Reliance on simple answers over policy seen as common failure
The list of world leaders and senior officials who have contracted Covid-19 is by now long, but U.S. President Donald Trump, in catching a disease he initially downplayed, has joined one that’s both shorter and more poignant.
Of the 10 nations hardest hit by the virus in terms of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, at least three – Brazil at 69, and the U.K. and U.S. at just above 63 -- are led by politicians who first belittled the coronavirus but were then infected by it.
That’s about more than schadenfreude, given the role governments have played in setting the policies and tone for the fight against a virus that has caused more than 1 million confirmed fatalities worldwide, hammered jobs and economies, and raised far-reaching questions about the future strength of nations and political systems.
“It deserves repeating — leadership does make an enormous difference, even in a federal state where much of the power sits at the regional level, like in Germany,” said Francois Heisbourg, a former official in the French foreign and defense ministries who now advises the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “If the leadership is wrong-headed, as it was in Brazil or the United States, you get the consequences.”