Opinion – Marcelo Leite: Almirante da Anvisa reacts to fascism on the Plateau

Jair Bolsonaro doesn’t let up on the Covid-19 front. It now takes children hostage, in its crusade of ambiguity and cowardice.

The two abstract nouns are not value judgments but objective descriptions of the marks of neo-fascism. I owe them to Márcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and Nuno Ramos, read in the pages of the book “O Fascism da Ambiguidade”, released by the philosopher at Editora UFRJ.

Ambiguity is the middle name of Bolsonaro, Messiah who announces a salvation today and its opposite tomorrow, or hours later. In the last live broadcast on Thursday (16), he attacked the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) again.

In the captain’s sights there is always meaning, or the possibility of making sense. His verbal barrage, under the pretext of defending traditional values, aims at the destruction of any and all values, by simple saturation. Slurring the public space is up to him.

The attack against Anvisa was not open, but sibylline, as usual. In eight pages of the Anvisa communiqué authorizing vaccination of children between 5 and 12 years old, full of evidence and scientific references, Bolsonaro pressed to read the recommendation number 9, between 19:

“[…] that parents or guardians are instructed to seek medical attention if the child experiences sudden chest pain, shortness of breath or palpitations after the application of the vaccine”.

The body language said, without the manliness of sowing suspicion with words: the vaccine can cause adverse effects in children. What was a necessary warning for rare events in any immunization becomes, in the malevolent presidential speech, a bucket of gasoline over the anti-vaccine fire.

“More than a falsehood, the fascist lie is a case of cowardice”, Nuno Ramos wrote in this Folha, words rescued by Schuback.

The height of pusillanimity was to stir up fanatics against the board of Anvisa. The president asked live, on Thursday night, to be informed, “unofficially” (?), of the names of those who had approved the inclusion of minors in the target audience of vaccination, to disclose them to parents.

As of 11:34 on the same day, however, the Anvisa statement was available in the domain of the federal government itself. Signed, obviously, by the agency’s directors: Meiruze Sousa Freitas, Cristiane Rose Jourdan Gomes, Alex Machado Campos, Romison Rodrigues Mota and Antonio Barra Torres (president).

First and last names are public, as the principles of transparency and responsibility dictate, but Bolsonaro treats them as if they weren’t. Insinuation and suggestion, here are the rhetorical weapons of the simple-minded and malicious tribune, as authentic as the pistols armed with the fingers that Brazil taught to ape.

Intriguing is the case of Rear Admiral Barra Torres. Doctor and already president of Anvisa, he participated in March 2020 in the president’s agglomeration —both without masks— with supporters in Brasília. Afterwards he was self-critical, and now he publishes an official note associating the president’s speech with death threats to his board.

How could you not have seen that it would come to that? Bolsonaro never hid his fascist disposition in three decades of speeches in Congress, after he was swept from the barracks. To take sides with the bad soldier who praises the torturer in plenary, or to vote for him, is to fraternize with both — there was no ambiguity there.

The possible explanation lies in the diagnosis made by Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini of Brazil’s constitutive dubiousness, as Schuback recalls: “It is by pure chance that a Brazilian is a fascist and another is subversive, and that the one who plucks out his eyes can be taken for the one whose eyes are gouged out”.