This Wednesday, the Brazilian Senate decided that Jair Bolsonaro should face criminal charges for his disastrous mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. By a seven-to-four vote, the senate committee investigating the far-right president’s actions approved a severely critical report on his decisions — although it pulled back from an earlier text that accused him of “genocide.” The four senators who voted against the report were all close allies of the president.

Yet, while the right-wingers on the committee sought to soften criticism of Bolsonaro, the final report concluded that his ministers, government authorities, and even some businesses were responsible for policies that caused hundreds of thousands of extra deaths. This toll was unsurprising given Bolsonaro’s failure to take preventive measures and insistence on defending (and investing public funds in) ineffective quack remedies. Yet it was aggravated by unnecessary delays in buying vaccines — the product of both the president’s denialism and government officials’ corruption in dealings with laboratories.

Under Bolsonaro, Brazil has in recent months become the world’s seventh-worst country for COVID-19 death rates. The total is already approaching 600,000, with more than half these deaths occurring in 2021, despite the availability of vaccines. Among the states with the highest per capita fatality rates worldwide, Brazil is the only country of continental proportions.