Opinion: Paulo Guedes is shielded in Covid-19 CPI report

The federal government intentionally promoted the spread of the pandemic in the country, anchored in the false and criminal premise that the generalized contagion of Brazilians would lead society to attain herd immunity. It created a policy to promote deliberate contagion, turning the country into a great grave for more than 600,000 dead, one of the highest mortality rates in the world.

This criminal policy of deliberate contagion was denounced by civil society, doctors, scientists, the press and was, in the end, confirmed by the CPI of the Pandemic. However, only partially. There are two big absences in the final report of the CPI: the contribution of the military (from the breakdown in health, to the mass production of chloroquine) and that of the Ministry of Economy, under the leadership of Paulo Guedes.

The size of the damage caused reveals that the federal government acted cohesive in implementing the deliberate policy of contamination of Brazilians. In economics, “herd immunity” was used explicitly as a justification for not adopting measures capable of mitigating the impact of the pandemic, imposing obstacles to the implementation of actions to contain the disease.

The CPI report cites the Ministry of Economy and budget problems involving the pandemic – but does not indicate its subjects and, consequently, does not hold them responsible. In the 1,289 pages of the final report, Paulo Guedes is mentioned only three times.

The Super Minister of Economy appears as a mere supporting role, despite his explicit participation in the decisions that turned the pandemic into the biggest humanitarian crisis in the country’s history, as detailed in Guedes’ impeachment request presented by Coalizão Direitos Valem Mais in October to the Supreme Court and filed as a subsidy document in the CPI of Covid-19.

The CPI heard 57 deponents in more than 64 meetings in the last six months. It brought hope and constituted a historic landmark in the effort of the National Congress to investigate and hold those responsible for the tragedy that the country is going through.

However, the absence of the Minister of Economy from the list of indictees, even with the recognition expressed in the report about part of the omissions and mistakes that marked the management of economic policy in the pandemic, reveals that the CPI chose to contribute to the shielding of Guedes and of its economic policy.

By not providing resources to fight the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, Paulo Guedes made the expenses happen through, above all, extraordinary credits, whose adoption is only possible for unpredictable expenses. In 2020 the pandemic was unpredictable; in 2021, no.

The implementation of the herd immunity policy allowed the poorest population to spend the most lethal four months of the pandemic without any assistance to follow measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

The government’s economic area explicitly conditioned the return of the benefit to the approval of new fiscal adjustment measures. Only resumed in April 2021, emergency aid was reduced to a quarter of the amount originally instituted by the National Congress and to just over half of the beneficiaries, the same month in which Budget 2021 was approved without considering the continuity of the pandemic and without forecasting resources for health and other social policies.

In addition, the economic area acted to prevent the release of resources for the Unified Health System in the first half of 2020, compromising a set of measures to contain the pandemic.

It is necessary that the disastrous economic policy conducted by Minister Paulo Guedes is faced by democratic institutions. This policy led to the accelerated growth of poverty, unemployment, social, racial, regional and gender inequalities in the country.

It is necessary to question the silencing and shielding, including sectors of the media, which place the population hostage to a backward and concentrationist economic model, which benefits the financial elite, despises public planning instruments, destroys public policies, systematically violates the Federal Constitution , and impoverishes and kills the population, from Covid-19 or from starvation.