Brazilian Scientists Are in Danger, and No One Is Doing Anything About It
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Loading... - Antonio Oliviera
- 22 Jun 2022
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In July of 2020, when the monstrous coronavirus pandemic had just begun to sink its teeth into Brazil, I took to the streets of Rio de Janeiro to do some reporting.
I stopped by the open-air pop-up markets that dot the beachside neighborhood of Copacabana and spoke to people who were shopping for produce amid ongoing lockdowns.
“Do you know the name of a famous Brazilian scientist?” I asked people as they passed.
At the time, President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain who is often called the “Tropical Trump,” was on a full-blown crusade against science. Bolsonaro tried to stop state governors from following lockdown protocols, promoted fake cures, and persecuted researchers who proved him wrong.
I wondered how much Brazilians cared about science, at a time when we needed it most.
Out of the dozen people I spoke to on the streets of Rio that day, only one knew a famous Brazilian scientist.
Embarrassed to tell me her name because she was a public-school teacher who couldn’t think of a single scientist, a young woman in glasses told me “Well, there is that vaccine guy, right? I forget what he’s called.”
She was referring to Oswaldo Cruz, the world-renowned Brazilian epidemiologist who founded Fiocruz, one of the world’s leading public health institutions. Most Brazilians don’t know that our country is home to internationally recognized research hubs.
Brazil has one of the largest public health care systems in the world and most of its top scientific institutions are government-funded.
In fact, the cosmopolitan state of São Paulo funds Instituto Butantan, one of the most celebrated scientific centers in the world. São Paulo governor João Doria often boasts that Brazil is among the four largest vaccine producers in the world and the largest in Latin America.
Instead of celebrating these feats, President Bolsonaro has gone to great lengths to slander science over the last two years.
In 2021, I spent nine months collecting persecution stories for a podcast published by Brazilian investigative news agency, Agencia Publica, about scientists who are being targeted for their research by Bolsonaro and his followers. What I discovered was grim: scientists all over Brazil have been fired, received death threats, or had to flee the country to guarantee their own safety.
But since we grow up having soccer players and not scientists as role models, it is no surprise that most Brazilians have not come out in defense of researchers who are attacked.
To make matters worse, Bolsonaro has made his anti-science stance a crucial pillar of public policy.
In March of 2020, I tuned into a presidential address that was aired on national television to discuss the pandemic. In his rigid military-like demeanor, Bolsonaro downplayed the severity of the situation calling the virus “a little flu” and asked local governors to go against lock-down measures recommended by the World Health Organization. Read More...
