By Gustavo A Maranges on April 19, 2022
photo: EFE/EPA
COVID-19 pandemic has been a difficult time for everybody, but it has shown the more unequal a country is, the more its people disproportionately suffer. So, it is not a coincidence finding the United States, India, and Brazil ranking as the top three in total cases. All three have faced enormous crisis prolonged and repeated every time a new strain has shown up.
Early this week, Brazil’s Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga just announced the end of the sanitary emergency state. It coincides with a regional trend since countries like Paraguay have taken the same measures, while others like Argentina and Chile have loosened border sanitary restrictions as well.
According to Queiroga, ending the state of emergency implies overruling more than 160 measures related to emergency authorization to use vaccines and buying unlicensed drugs to tackle the pandemic. It will also bring changes to sanitary protocols inside the country and the resumption or extension of some economic and cultural activities.
COVID-19 cases have been dwindling for the last two months after reaching a peak in February due to the Omicron variant. During the last days, active cases in Brazil barely surpassed 300,000, while two months ago the numbers were around 2.5 and 3 million infected people.
Government officials assured that the new measure comes after major advances in the vaccination campaign, which has reduced the number of people in severe or critical health conditions. As of today, Brazil has managed to fully vaccinate over 76% of its population, while almost 50% have received a booster dose. Despite all these real facts, it is important to remember that President Jair Bolsonaro has been pushing to get rid of the emergency state for months, since he is among the most stubborn people in the world about the pandemic, to his American role model Donald Trump.
Even when the measure matches his interest, he has been, probably, the biggest obstacle in this run. Bolsonaro has been fined several times for ignoring sanitary protocols during his rallies amid the worse time of the pandemic. However, his negligence is not only in his inner circles but in the entire country. His first contribution to the country’s debacle was neglecting the public health system. He expelled thousands of Cuban doctors who worked in unfavored zones of the country (coincidently, the most affected by the pandemic) and later started an absurd campaign to deny the seriousness of the pandemic, which delayed every strategy to counter the disease.
Today, in the prelude to the upcoming Presidential Election, this measure is crucial and very positive for the current president, who is struggling to avoid the complete collapse of his image. Loosening COVID-19 restrictions will gain him some good critics among the entrepreneurs, but its most likely not enough to tackle his opponent and former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Lula has been very critical of Bolsonaro and has accused him of bringing to ashes almost an entire decade of social investment. The Worker’s Party candidate is aware that social expenditure, mainly on public health, is the only way to control the pandemic. The experiences of Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, China, and some European countries are key proofs of the benefits of a robust public health system and a rapid and coordinated response.
However, Bolsonaro chose to waste resources on useless medicines like chloroquine, refused to implement lockdowns, and even threatened to militarize the country if anti-COVID measures were adopted in some states. This features the ongoing investigation for him being linked to more than one corruption scandal related to vaccines, some of which include members of his family. He also faces investigations for crimes against public health since many people point out that he the main responsible for the death of over 662,000 Brazilians.
Bolsonaro became a sort of nightmare in the darkest night for the Brazilian people. He appointed four different Health Ministers in less than two years since it was impossible to deal with his delirious statements while thousands of people were dying without the possibility of attending a hospital or seeing a doctor and not talking about getting the necessary treatments.
The decrease in COVID-19 numbers is great news for Brazil, but the footprint of Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic is impossible to erase. So far, over 30 million people have been infected by COVID-19, meaning one out of 7 Brazilians. Brazil accounts for 5.9% of the world’s total cases, which is a lot for a country with roughly 0.25% of the world population.
Looking at all this disaster, many people would think Bolsonaro was insane, but he is not, and neither was Trump. They just put first what was more important for them; business and money over people’s lives. The whole attitude of Bolsonaro was about favoring powerful economic circles fighting against any measure that could restrict their production capacity and, consequently, their profits. After all, that is the bedrock of neoliberal ideology, guiding decisions where people are considered simply numbers.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English