The Brazilian president’s botched response to the world’s second-worst COVID-19 outbreak: Bolsonaro is now putting his faith in an unproven COVID-19 treatment
FILE PHOTO: Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro adjusts his protective face mask during a press statement to announce federal judiciary measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus disease in Brasilia, Brazil March 18, 2020. Picture taken March 18, 2020. REUTERS/Adriano Machado
Later, in a separate video, he gulped down a third pill. He said he was aware of other treatments, but noted none of them had been proven to work.Bolsonaro’s illness is a potent symbol of his government’s botched response to the outbreak. More than 1.7 million people in Brazil have tested positive for coronavirus and nearly 68,000 have died. Only the United States has performed worse.
Bolsonaro has been undeterred by such pronouncements. He has pushed his Health Ministry to expand access to the drugs and dispensed with two Health Ministers - Luiz Henrique Mandetta and Nelson Teich - who had urged a more cautious approach. Bolsonaro was initially inspired by his political idol, U.S. President Donald Trump, who was an early advocate of hydroxychloroquine, a dozen sources said. But Bolsonaro has gone much further than his U.S. counterpart.His new-look Health Ministry, now led by soldiers and Bolsonaro loyalists, has eagerly promoted the antimalarials as the best hope against COVID-19.
Since leaving, he has said publicly that he resigned due to disagreements with Bolsonaro, who was pressuring him to broaden access to hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine. Exclusive Reuters reporting reveals that Teich hoped to persuade Bolsonaro to wait for results from a fast-tracked hydroxychloroquine trial, but was unable to convince the president, according to four people familiar with the situation.
Raoult’s advocacy of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine was picked up by right-wing bloggers and libertarian thinkers. Then, on March 19, Trump waded into the debate. “I think it could be a game changer,” said Trump, who claims to have briefly taken hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic. On March 21, two days after Trump’s comments, Bolsonaro announced he was ordering the Army Chemical and Pharmaceutical Laboratory to ramp up chloroquine production in Brazil for use as a COVID-19 treatment. Following that directive, the lab, located in Rio de Janeiro, has manufactured 2.25 million 150-milligram chloroquine pills, the Army told Reuters.
“The majority of them served in the Amazon,” said Osmar Terra, Bolsonaro’s former Citizenship Minister, who has informally advised the government during the crisis. “All of them have used hydroxychloroquine for a long time.”The Health Ministry said it has distributed 4.4 million chloroquine tablets to the states. It is unclear how widely they are being administered, as Brazil’s physicians are free to prescribe the drugs as they see fit.
At their meeting, Yamaguchi told Reuters that Bolsonaro showed her press reports about Raoult’s hydroxychloroquine study. He wanted to know “why it couldn’t be used more widely” in Brazil, she said. Yamaguchi said she told the president she was concerned about a lack of supply, in part because India, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of generic medicine, had imposed a March export ban on hydroxychloroquine to meet its own domestic demand.
That same day, Brazil’s Federal Medical Council , which is in charge of medical licensing and ethics, agreed on guidelines for how and when doctors could prescribe the drugs. On the condition of Health Ministry support, Avezum agreed to fast-track the study, two sources said. Avezum declined to comment on those talks, but said the aim was to be as efficient as possible.
“I’m the one who makes decisions,” the president said, according to two sources with knowledge of that meeting.Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are now flashpoints in Brazil’s polarized politics. People’s views of the drugs have become something of a referendum on their president, much like masks in the United States.
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