If it depends on this scribe, the nickname “Queirodes”, playfully coined by the good bad languages of the internet, will remain on the forehead of the current Health Minister until the end of his days. Marcelo Queiroga deserves to be compared to Herod, the sovereign child-killer of Matthew’s Gospel, not only for creating ridiculous obstacles to the vaccination of little ones against Covid-19, but also for the tremendous intellectual dishonesty that characterizes his attitudes—a typically Herodian dishonesty.
Indeed, both the New Testament and secular historical sources indicate that Herod’s Judaism, like the Bolsonaro government’s “God above all” Christianity, was more false than a $3.50 bill. Grandson of pagans converted to the Jewish faith by force, polygamist and murderer of some of his own children, Herod did not hesitate to make peace with his Roman patrons by building temples to foreign gods in the middle of the Holy Land.
In the name of political survival, the king of Judea was capable of anything — as was our “Cheirod”, it seems. It’s the only explanation for why he thought Bolsonaro’s attempt to intimidate the ANVISA officials who approved the childhood vaccinations was extremely normal — “Guys, it’s just for transparency,” he said, doing the Egyptian (or the Herodian).
The height of intellectual dishonesty, however, was the claim that child deaths caused by Covid-19 are at a low plateau. The current pandemic has shown how indigent the formation of a non-negligible part of the Brazilian medical class is, but even if we take this into account, it is difficult to believe that Queiroga does not know how to do math, or simply does not perceive the differences in the order of magnitude between numbers in the in the hundreds or thousands.
This simple operation, which even a good part of the little ones left unprotected by the minister would be able to do, shows that just over a thousand children, including newborns and those aged up to 9 years, have died from Covid-19 in Brazil so far. . It is little compared to the universe of victims of the disease — but more than the total number of children who died from all other diseases that can be prevented with vaccination in the country in the last 15 years, as shown by a UOL report. In 2020, ten Brazilians in this age group died from measles, for example. (Deaths, by the way, that could probably have been avoided if vaccination rates in Brazil hadn’t been dropping worryingly.)
If Queiroga knows all this (if he doesn’t, he ought to know), the only explanation for his attitudes is the canine subservience to the claque of hoodlums, madmen and scoundrels. It’s the same pack that keeps repeating the mantra “experimental vaccine, experimental vaccine” to talk about immunizations that have gone through all the procedures required for the approval of any other drug of this type. Immunizations, by the way, which have already been used extensively on children in the US.
The biggest Christmas irony of this whole situation is that the historical Herod probably didn’t order the “Slaughter of the Lambs” — most experts say the narrative is a theological creation of the evangelist Matthew. The death of children by Covid-19 in Brazil remains very real. Their blood, like Abel’s, still cries out from the land where it was shed.
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