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This article focuses on Brazil and Peru, the Latin American epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic during 2020 and 2021. The pandemic magnified the legacy of years of neoliberal policies, corruption and racism in these countries, the limitations of their poverty-reduction programs, the fragility of their democratic systems, and the insufficient political regard for public health and basic sanitation. I rely on the concepts of negligence and necropolitics. The first refers to the abdication of authorities in providing sufficient basic services to its citizens. The second - coined by Achille Mbembe before the pandemic - is used to explain the banalization by governments of preventable deaths of discriminated social groups. On a global level, the problematic access to medical equipment and vaccines was a failure because of the hoarding of vaccines by rich nations and the blaming of developing countries for their high mortality. The result was that national and international governmental reactions to COVID-19 worsened health asymmetries within countries and between the Global North and South.
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This interview with Deisy Ventura, professor at the Faculty of Public Health of the Universidade de São Paulo, discusses the political dimension of the covid-19 pandemic in Brazil. She has become a leading reference on the subject due to her extensive knowledge of international law, with a focus on health. In this interview, Deisy Ventura offers some reflections on global health and discusses the handling of the pandemic in Brazil and its human rights implications. According to Ventura, the Brazilian government had a systematic policy for the spread of the virus, and the pandemic should be treated as a matter of memory, truth, and justice.
Entrevista com Deisy Ventura, professora titular da Faculdade de Saúde Pública da Universidade de São Paulo, que discute a dimensão política da pandemia de covid-19 no Brasil. A pesquisadora se tornou uma das principais referências no assunto por seu amplo conhecimento de direito internacional com foco em saúde. Na entrevista, ela apresenta reflexões relacionadas à saúde global, além de discutir a gestão da pandemia no país e suas implicações para os direitos humanos. De acordo com a pesquisadora, houve no Brasil uma política governamental sistemática de disseminação do vírus, e a pandemia deveria ser tratada como uma questão de memória, verdade e justiça.
Assuntos
COVID-19 , Feminino , Humanos , COVID-19/epidemiologia , Pandemias , Brasil/epidemiologia , Justiça SocialRESUMO
This article analyzes the efforts of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (IHDRF) in its project initiative that resulted in the extermination of the African mosquito Anopheles gambiae from Brazil in 1940. This species, which originated in Dakar, Senegal, was identified in the Brazilian city of Natal in 1930, where insufficient local emergency sanitation actions enabled it to spread into the interior of the Brazilian northeast, causing an unprecedented malaria epidemic in the Americas in 1938, after years of silent spread. We will analyse the formation of Brazil's Malaria Service of the Northeast (MSNE), discussing its political and scientific controversies and how the transition from the idea of extermination to the idea of eradication was consolidated in the political process of creating this successful sanitation campaign. In addition, we will discuss how the integration and transnational development of medical entomology at the time was a fundamental factor in the cooperation and challenges among scientists involved in this campaign. The international cooperation of scientists, albeit oriented towards the project of eradication of this mosquito, organised different research agendas and gained new insights into the global dissemination of mosquito-borne diseases.