The president (PT) resumed this Monday (11) speaking about the pandemic, showed a kind of report on how the management of () acted in the face of the spread of the disease and said that his activists need to read the document.
Lula said that the person who produced the piece was . The head of the department, (PT), said that he created the document as an individual, without using the ministry structure.
The president made the statement and showed the report during the sanction of the project that establishes March 12 as a national day in memory of the victims of Covid-19. This is an allusion to March 12, 2020, when diarist Rosana Aparecia Urbano died in São Paulo.
She was the first victim of the pandemic in the country. In the following three years, the country would record 700,000 deaths caused by the disease. In 2022, the way Bolsonaro dealt with the pandemic, minimizing the power of the virus and opposing vaccines, was one of the themes most explored by Lula in the electoral campaign that returned him to the Presidency of the Republic.
“The Ministry of Health published here the ‘Bolsonaro Administration and the Covid-19 pandemic’. It is important that each activist has this in hand, because here is everything that was the misfortune that they talked about during two years of the pandemic”, said Lula.
The President of the Republic also cited Bolsonaro’s statements against vaccines and criticized doctors and entities that defended chloroquine as a treatment for the disease – a prescription that was not based on scientific research.
“If we don’t give names to the ox, these citizens will walk through the streets as if they were human beings who had a minimum of humanist feelings”, stated the PT member.
He also called former deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro a “runaway”, although without directly mentioning his name. Bolsonaro’s 3rd son moved to the United States last year and acted to pit the American government against the Lula administration.
After the sanction, minister Alexandre Padilha was asked by journalists whether the production, by the Ministry of Health, of a document that targets the Bolsonaro administration would not constitute placing the government in the role of a political campaign.
Padilha said he produced the text as an individual, not through the ministry structure. He also minimized the fact that Lula recommended the document to his activists. “He did not ask the government to distribute [o relatório ]nor for the structure of the Ministry of Health to distribute”, declared the minister of .
One of Lula’s main bets both to reinforce the government’s popularity and to increase its ability to attract support for his re-election is to compare his administration with that of Bolsonaro. His main rival will be the former president’s eldest son, senator Flávio (PL-RJ).
The PT member believes he is at the head of a government with more achievements than his opponent’s. He also seeks to benefit from the rejection that Bolsonaro faces. Important allies of the PT member, such as former minister Fernando Haddad (PT), began to refer to Flávio as “Bolsonarinho”, in an attempt to encourage the senator to reject the former president, who is his father.
