Opinion – Atila Iamarino: The Covid pandemic is passing; the infodemic, no

Sars-CoV-2 is a dreadful virus. But his pandemic was certainly made worse by the infodemic, which here in Brazil started two years ago.

The World Health Organization defines an infodemic as information overload, including “false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak”.

Ignorance is common. Until the beginning of the last century, we didn’t even know which organisms caused pandemics. The influenza virus was only isolated 15 years after the pandemic it caused in 1918.

Health misinformation is also common. In the search for a form of control over what ails us, there is no lack of “therapies” for problems that still have no solution. Like phosphoethanolamine, which was already shown to be ineffective against cancer in 2017 but can still be purchased as a dietary supplement.

And it was no different in Covid. In Iran, hundreds have died from drinking methanol against the coronavirus. Here in Latin America, people consumed water with chlorine dioxide for the same reason. But in Brazil, false information and distrust of health authorities were promoted by the authorities themselves.

Until March 2020, the federal government acted proactively to stop the virus and the Minister of Health warned that the health system would reach capacity at the end of April. From then on, the questioning of the severity of the disease (the “little flu”) began, the promotion of chloroquine, the movement “Brazil cannot stop” and the change of increasingly obedient ministers.

A recently published study comparing Covid deaths in Brazilian municipalities shows the damage of this official campaign. In 2020, deaths from Covid followed factors common to several other countries: they were concentrated in large cities and in regions with lower health infrastructure, lower development index and greater concentration of income.

But in 2021, the wave of the Gamma variant (P.1) caught us when many thought the worst was over and after the Ministry’s health measures had been sprayed to the municipalities. That’s when the infodemic did the most damage.

Lies about the disease, early treatment and Covid kit, the delay in the purchase of vaccines and the vulnerability of mayors to pressure from voters and the regional economy changed the distribution of the more than 410 thousand deaths recorded in 2021.

In this second phase of the pandemic, among many cities that should have a comparable response to Covid, those with greater electoral alignment with the government in 2018 had significantly more deaths. According to the authors of the study, in the worst year of the pandemic, “ideology and political orientation determined each city’s ability to protect itself from infection and the subsequent effects on mortality”.

We are seeing fewer deaths every day in the country thanks to vaccines. We could see even better numbers if we incorporated treatments that really work against Covid into the SUS, such as monoclonal and antiviral antibodies. But we are heading in the opposite direction.

Anvisa, which acted in an exemplary manner in relation to vaccines and chloroquine, has just lost part of its control over medicines with the enactment of Law No. Covid kit.

They are still trying to claim that the Queen of the United Kingdom took ivermectin. They still want to paint the pandemic green and call it endemic. Childhood vaccination still slips. The infodemic is not over. And with her help, not even the pandemic.