TSE vetoes Queiroga’s statement on TV with praise for the fight against Covid

The president of the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), Edson Fachin, vetoed a statement by the Minister of Health, Marcelo Queiroga, on a radio and TV chain with praise for the fight against Covid-19 in Brazil.

In the decision signed on Monday (8), Fachin stated that the principle of impersonality “disallows the personification of programs of the federal public administration”, especially in the period before the elections.

The theme of Queiroga’s speech would be the launch of the 2022 polio vaccination and multi-vaccination campaign.

In the middle of the speech, the Minister of Health planned to say: “During the Covid-19 pandemic, we demonstrated our ability to acquire and vaccinate, in record time, our population”.

“With this, we achieved high rates of vaccination coverage that allowed us to control the public health emergency of national importance”, Queiroga would also say.

President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) is a vector of misinformation about the vector of misinformation about immunization and care in the pandemic. Queiroga and members of the government, however, try to make the speech that the president made an effort to buy immunizations against the pandemic.

Fachin even released, on the last day 3, the disclosure of the campaign, “only allowed the identification of the Ministry of Health”.

Then, the communication secretary of the Jair Bolsonaro government (PL), André de Sousa Costa, asked Fachin to also authorize Queiroga’s speech.

The Ministry of Health wanted to present Queiroga’s speech on Saturday (5), the date on which the National Health Day is celebrated. The government postponed the speech to await the position of the TSE.

The new plan was to deliver the speech on August 9, 10 or 11.

For Fachin, despite the speech proposed by the government addressing the campaign against poliomyelitis, the “tone” of the speech “narrates the performance of the Ministry of Health, in the remote and near past”.

Queiroga told the press this Tuesday (9) that it is necessary to use “all means” to provide the correct information about immunization. “I don’t know of a more inducing measure for vaccination than the word of the minister of health, who is the main health authority in Brazil”, he also stated.

The Elections Law prevents institutional publicity from public bodies in the three months preceding the elections. Fachin considered that Queiroga’s speech would not fit the exceptions of this prohibition.

The video had already been recorded and sent to the EBC (Empresa Brasil de Comunicação).

The government’s objective is to achieve at least 95% vaccination coverage in children aged 1 to 5 years, a goal achieved for the last time in Brazil in 2015. Since then, adherence to the vaccination campaign has only been falling and, in the year last year, for example, stood at 69.9%, according to data from the Ministry of Health.