It is not often that a parliamentary inquiry raises our spirits. But that is exactly what the Brazilian Senate investigation that began on April 27 on the management of the pandemic is doing. As COVID continues to rage across Brazil, killing more than a thousand people a day, the investigation could force President Jair Bolsonaro to account for his actions (more or less). It’s also a great distraction from harsh reality. Streamed and on the Senado TV channel, it is a strangely fascinating demonstration of ineptitude and lies. Here is an example. In March 2020, as the pandemic spread, the president’s communications offices launched a campaign entitled “Brazil can’t stop” on social networks. He urged people not to change their habits, stating: “Deaths related to covid-19 among adults and young people are rare”. This initiative, heavily criticized, was then banned by a federal judge and finally forgotten.
Then the plot thickened. The former head of government communications, Fabio Wajngarten, told investigators that he did not know who was responsible for the campaign. He later remembered that it was actually his office that developed it, but said it had left without authorization. A senator has called for the arrest of Wajngarten, who has cast an almost poetic look at the horizon. An extraordinary moment.
It is not surprising that many Brazilians are interested in the investigation. So far we have enjoyed the testimony of three former health ministers, the former foreign minister, the former director of communications and the regional manager of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. The content of the testimony is obvious, yet scandalous: President Jair Bolsonaro, apparently, wanted to bring the country to herd immunity by naturally infecting people, regardless of the consequences. This – assuming a mortality rate of around 1 percent and 70 percent of infections as a plausible threshold for herd immunity – means that Bolsonaro predicted at least 1.4 million deaths in Brazil. In his eyes, the 450,000 Brazilians who have died so far from covid-19 are like a job left unfinished.
Promises and negligence
Described in this way, his attempt appears shocking. But for Bolsonaro-ruled Brazilians this is no surprise. After all, it appeared that the president was doing everything possible to facilitate the spread of the virus. He spent 2020 speaking out and taking action against all scientifically proven measures to limit the spread of the virus. Social distancing, he said, is a thing for “idiots”. The masks are a “fiction”. And vaccines can turn us into crocodiles. Then there was hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug that Bolsonaro promoted as a miracle cure, despite all the studies indicating otherwise. And it doesn’t stop there.
According to Wajngarten and Carlos Murillo, Pfizer’s regional manager, between August and November 2020 the pharmaceutical company repeatedly offered to sell its vaccine to the Brazilian government, without receiving any response. Considering that Brazil was one of the first countries to have been approached by the company, a rapid response would have guaranteed up to 1.5 million doses by the end of 2020, and another 17 million in the first half of 2021. having rejected three other offers, the government signed a contract in March, even seven months after the first offer. The first million doses arrived at the end of April. The vaccination campaign, due to the government’s negligence in obtaining the doses, went on in fits and starts, with frequent vaccine shortages and a lack of supplies leading to production delays.
Who knows if this was all part of the plan. When General Eduardo Pazuello, Brazilian health minister between May 2020 and March 2021, was asked why his ministry had requested fewer doses than any other country from Covax, the World Organization-led global vaccine distribution program of health care, he did not flinch. The procedure, he explained casually, was too risky and the vaccines too expensive. That’s all. Brazil could have asked for enough doses to immunize half the population, but was satisfied with ten percent.
It seems increasingly clear that the government’s goal was herd immunity. The bitter irony is that perhaps it is impossible to achieve it. In the city of Manaus, where 76 percent of the population had been infected in October, the result was not immunity, but a new variant. The Senate investigation is slowly uncovering a plot hatched by a group of villains. That the bad guys get the punishment they deserve is another story.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)
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