Brazilian military takeover of health ministry proves a risky business

One reason Brazil has become a textbook case of how not to respond to a global health emergency is that despite being one of the epicentres of the coronavirus pandemic, the country has been without a health minister for the past 64 days.

It was May 15th when the last one, oncologist Nelson Teich, resigned after refusing to endorse chloroquine for treating Covid-19 patients.

This left him in an untenable position with far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who has demonstrated a bizarre mania for the anti-malarial drug, which the World Health Organisation says is useless in treating coronavirus. Teich had lasted less than a month in the job.

Since then Bolsonaro has turned the health ministry over to a team of military men with no experience in public health. Led by Gen Eduardo Pazuello, a paratrooper with a background in logistics who serves as interim minister, their performance has been a disaster.

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In 60 per cent of cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, the rate of infection is still accelerating

When Teich walked, Brazil had recorded 15,000 deaths and 220,000 confirmed cases. Today the death toll has passed 77,000 and more than two million people have been infected. In 60 per cent of cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, the rate of infection is still accelerating even as measures to contain the disease’s spread are being eased.

The risks in the armed forces taking on a mission they are not trained for were laid bare this week when supreme court justice Gilmar Mendes caused a political storm when he said the army was now being associated with "genocide".

The military men in the Bolsonaro administration and the commanders of the military’s three branches were enraged by the comments. But demands for a retraction, especially of the word “genocide”, were snubbed.

Nakedly political

Mendes, the most nakedly political operator on the supreme court, itself an old rival of the military in Brazil’s constitutional power struggles, would clearly have chosen his words carefully. Last month he said an attempt by Pazuello’s team to alter how the country counted Covid-19 deaths – foiled by the supreme court – would not absolve the government of responsibility for the “slaughter”.

In his typically hyperbolic style, Mendes was also merely stating the obvious – that by staffing the leadership nucleus of the health ministry, the army will inevitably be associated with its efforts to combat the pandemic, and to date these have been catastrophic.

Bolsonaro's administration is proving a consummate shredder of the reputations of those who serve in it

After all it was Pazuello who at the behest of Bolsonaro flew in the face of the global medical consensus and authorised Brazil’s public health service to use chloroquine on Covid-19 patients. The president had already ordered the army to mass-produce the drug, and the finances of this programme are now under suspicion, another embarrassment for an officer corps that prides itself on its rectitude.

And so while the defence ministry has called on the chief federal prosecutor to investigate Mendes under the dictatorship-era national security law, the military high command has signalled it wants Pazuello to either quit as interim health minister or retire from the military.

Reputation shredder

It is the latest signal that the high command is growing increasingly uneasy at its association with Bolsonaro, whose administration is proving a consummate shredder of the reputations of those who serve in it.

Meanwhile the president, who is self-isolating since contracting Covid-19 earlier this month, continued his increasingly aggressive marketing campaign in favour of chloroquine during his weekly Facebook Live session on Thursday night.

His hard-line quackery means that if the military does give up responsibility for the health ministry, it will be a tough ask finding someone suitably qualified to serve under such a trenchant denier of reality as Bolsonaro.