For many observers in the United States, the political actions of Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil may appear to mimic US president Donald Trump’s disregard for science-informed policy and admiration for exclusionary nationalism. However, Marcos Cueto shows in this essay for the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series that Bolsonaro’s actions must be understood in a broader Brazilian context of history, politics, and health policy. Cueto illustrates the influence of longstanding public health policies that focus on technological interventions without addressing social determinants, and finds a continuity with the perspective of the state as a whole toward public health, a tendency to rely on vertical authority structures, and Bolsonaro’s approach to the pandemic, including his evidence-defying embrace of the drug chloroquine.
Marcos Cueto
Marcos Cueto is a professor at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is editor of the journal História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos and author, with Theodore Brown and Elizabeth Fee, of The World Health Organization: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2019).