Modi is one of the worst pandemic leaders in the world, say academics. Who are the others?

Covid-19 is notoriously hard to control, and political leaders are only part of the calculus when it comes to pandemic management. But some current and former world leaders have made little effort to combat outbreaks in their country, whether by downplaying the pandemic’s severity, disregarding science or ignoring critical health interventions like social distancing and masks. All of the men on this list committed at least one of those mistakes, and some committed all of them – with deadly consequences.

We’ve got experts on 5 countries looking at how 5 leaders screwed up their countries’ pandemic response.

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Who did the worst? Twitter only allows 4 options in a poll, so to vote for Belarus’s Lukashenko or someone else, leave a comment below

— The Conversation U.S. (@ConversationUS) May 18, 2021

1. Narendra Modi

India is the new epicentre of the global pandemic, touching 4,00,000 new cases per day in May. However grim, this statistic fails to capture the sheer horror unfolding there. Covid-19 patients are dying in hospitals because doctors have no oxygen to give and no lifesaving drugs like remdesivir. The sick are turned away from clinics that have no free beds.

Many Indians blame one man for the country’s tragedy: Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In January, Modi declared at a global forum that India had “saved humanity … by containing corona effectively.” In…

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