The price of the pandemic for Brazil
The first vaccine was applied. But until it happened, the country lived a bad administration in which the price becomes unsustainable
SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL — The Coronavirus arrived in Brazil in February 2020. Little less than a year later, the virus had collected, as in the rest of the world, uncountable amounts of infections and deaths. Today, the country has, according to data from the Ministry of Health, an amount higher than 8 million infected people and more than 200 thousand deaths.
Despite these numbers, Brazil, as another 56 countries, started the vaccination against Covid-19, with the first vaccine applied on 17/01/21. Concerning the vaccination campaign, the country is today, the 8th most vaccinated nation in the world. According to the Ministry of Health, 2,677,370 applications have been realized to this moment.
However, until this reality arrives, Brasil had a troubled politic regiment responsible for bad crisis management in relation to the Coronavirus pandemic. This cost the country which observed unfavourable scenarios in all of her sectors. And the first of these sectors to feel the impact of the pandemic was health.
Although Brazil has a well-architected health system, the bad administration of the pandemic crisis made the Single Health System (SHS) a failed operation. This happened because, for its operation, there was a necessary integration between three powers; federal administration, the state and municipal powers. And that union did not exist.
According to the political scientist and coordinator of the Brazilian Center for Studies and Research on Democracy (BCSRD/Serj) Geraldo Tadeu Monteiro, the top of the health system is formed by the federal administration and this same politic sphere manifested negation concerning the pandemic. “This extreme negation led to the resignation of two medical ministers and the replacement by a non-medical minister, one military, who confessed to not know what is SHS when assumed the ministry. “So, this has a cost”, he explains.
Those situations can stimulate the spirit of politic polarization in Brazil, something that has grown since 2013 that occurred from March to June. This event revealed in the traditional middle class, dissatisfaction with the economic crises from that year. But this feeling of displeasure extended until 2016, reaching events like Fifa World Cup 2014 and the Olympic Games of 2016. After all, these events drained many investments.
This story of polarization, according to Monteiro, took place with the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the withdrawal, by legal forces, of Lula’s legend from the 2018 elections. “These factors, associated with the disintegration of the political centre, which is related to very strong antipetistas stimulated by the Lava Jato operation, paved the way for the election of Jair Bolsonaro,” he explains.
“And here it is worth remembering that the Bolsonaro government is a militant government. It is a government that is not concerned with delivering public goods at the tip. It is concerned with making policy, with keeping the troops galvanized for combat. This is because it believes it is charged with a mission: the mission of defending Brazil from corrupt, communist, pro-abortion, and gender-oriented ideologies, among other ideological motivations. So the polarization is kept permanently alive by the government’s own action”, he concludes.
Inside the political sector, there still exists another factor that socially, and in the field of health, had a negative impact. In January, Bolsonaro was involved in an unsuccessful event with regard to the negotiation with the Indian government for the import of the vaccine. As a result, when India started exporting the immunizer it ended up leaving Brazil off the list of countries that would receive it.
These attitudes reflect one geopolitical choice of the Indian government; that it preferred to strengthen its influence on the Asian continent. However, according to the professor of international relations at ESPM, Fábio Pereira de Andrade, this observation can’t be used to deflect from the responsibilities of the Brazilian federal government. This is because there wasn’t any strategy to deal with the crisis, even if the Brazilian government became hostage to the decisions of the Indian government.
Nevertheless, the political agendas of both countries have several points of convergence. “Both formulate their actions and inaction based on three milestones: the first encompasses criticism of the institutions that characterize liberal democracy, especially as regards the separation of powers and representation. The second involves questions to the organization of foreign policy based on multilateralism. And the third is that both are based on the belief that they play a historical role in reestablishing conservative political forces,” explains Andrade.
Going to internal issues, Brazil also witnessed a market unfavorable scenario. According to IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) already in September last year the country experienced an increase of 27.6% in unemployment. In January this year, however, Ford announced the closure of its factories in the country, leaving 5,000 people unemployed.
But not only Ford. In December, Mercedes announced its departure from the country. Both automakers evaluated that the poor economic situation and high production costs in the country as some of the reasons for the decision. For the situation to return to normal, the economist, political analyst and president of the Oxford Group, Carlo Barbieri, evaluates that it is necessary to make a complete tax reform. According to him, if each one can act in his area, the situation can return to the place.
Given the number of unemployed people, it is undeniable that during the pandemic period, Brazil slid into an economic crisis. And the legacy of this scenario will not be positive. “What the pandemic will leave behind is the increase in poverty. After all, the conflict against Coronavirus has hit the lower classes hard. This is because in Brazil the economic investment was small and thus the population could not maintain itself,” notes Barbieri.
It was not only the economic sector that had little attention during the pandemic. The national environment was also helpless of support and attention. As a result, data from Inpe (National Institute of Space Research) indicate that the outbreaks of fire had a growth, in 2020, 12% higher than in 2019.
And the biome most affected was the Amazon. Last year, the biome had an increase of 15% in its fire outbreaks compared to 2019, totalling 103,134 points. For the researcher from the Federal Rural University of the Amazon (UFRA), Divino Silvério, there are two important negative impacts of this scenario.
They consist of the great reduction of the average humidity over the Amazon and the significant changes in the precipitation regime of some regions. “Together, these changes are taking the Amazon to a threshold from where recovery will no longer be possible. In this way, the whole system can become trapped in a state of open and degraded vegetation, what some researchers call the savanization of Amazonia,” he laments.
But it is not only with fire that Brazilian nature, and the Amazon biome in particular, have been affected. In 2020 the Amazon forest still suffered from deforestation. In that period, there was a deforestation 70% higher than the average of the previous decade. This shows, among other things, the weakness of public policies that protect the environment.
According to Silvério, however, today it is possible to know exactly where the deforestation is taking place. After all, satellite monitoring allows the detection, in almost real time, of deforested areas. However, the researcher points out that there is a lack of political will for the implementation of enforcement actions to curb these practices and fine the aggressors of nature.
According to the researcher, almost one-third of deforestation occurs in public areas, so the solution to this problem lies in the allocation of public lands. “Additionally, we need incentives for the chain of non-timber forest products and mechanisms to value forests. Apart from this, landowners who preserve their land also need to be financially rewarded,” he lists. “An important step towards this was the approval in Congress of the National Policy for Payments for Environmental Services. It establishes guidelines and criteria for the payment of environmental services and can help in the valuation of the forest”, he celebrates.
At the other end of the spectrum is the society and culture of the Brazilian population. Like all other sectors that make up Brazil, they have also been heavily impacted by the pandemic. And the legacy of the Covid-19 era in the country can already be seen in detail.
In the more sociological and anthropological sense of the term, perhaps one of the main legacies of the pandemic in Brazil will be that of a more brutalized society. This is what the sociologist Jorge Leite Jr. believes. For him, ignorance, disregard for life or death, disrespect for suffering and mourning, and the stimulus to aggression and discord have been naturalized.
This is also the point of view of the anthropologist and social scientist Expedito Leandro Silva. For him, Brazil does not have and did not have a federal policy that offered a feeling of solidarity and was concerned with fighting and preventing the Covid-19 from spreading further in the country.
It is interesting to note, therefore, how politics, the opposite end of the Brazilian sectors, directly affects the social scope. Each action perpetrated by the government has, consequently, an effect on society. For this reason, carrying out positive and constructive actions is the primary duty of the federal government.
However, Dr. Riberti de Almeida sees Jair Bolsonaro’s exercise during the pandemic as chaos and something without institutional coordination to deal with the effects of the pandemic. “A head of state who since the beginning of the pandemic has denied the coronavirus, doubted science and even bet on ineffective drugs against the virus, reveals a posture totally without empathic connection with a focus on misinformation and even disunion of Brazilians,” he notes.
Through his posture, Bolsonaro promoted the idea of comparing the pandemic with a war situation, a problematic relationship from a sociological point of view. After all, according to sociologist Jorge Leite Jr., the idea of war presupposes an enemy to be destroyed, legitimizes the state of violence, presupposes and stimulates aggressive and bellicose moods, besides liberating people, in the name of a greater good, to commit the greatest atrocities.
The professional stresses that the virus is a virus. Not an enemy general. Not a strategist and not a soldier who is intentionally coming to destroy the country. “If we think that we are really living logic of war, nothing more natural, nothing more than a logical consequence, is to put in the ministry of health a military. This is a direct consequence of this absurd logic of thinking that we are living in a war,” criticizes Leite Jr.
