Brazil’s President unveils cabinet reshuffle as anger grows over Covid-19 death toll

Jair Bolsonaro has battled calls for his impeachment as deaths from COVID-19 have surged above 300,000.

Covid-19 patients at a field hospital in Santo Andre, Sao Paulo state. Picture: AFP

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has unveiled a deep cabinet reshuffle as his administration comes under intense pressure with COVID-19 raging out of control in the country, killing more than a hundred Brazilians an hour.

Mr Bolsonaro announced the exit of combative Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo on Tuesday AEDT after swaths of congress demanded the diplomat’s ouster, blaming him for scuppering vaccine supply deals. The president said he was also changing his defence and justice ministers, chief of staff and two more top government officials as he tries to shore up his political base amid growing calls for his impeachment.

Home to less than 3 per cent of the world’s population, Brazil has accounted for as much as a third of global deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic in recent days, as a highly contagious new variant from the Amazon, P. 1, wreaks havoc across the country.

A preliminary study last Friday linked the strain with a sharp rise in the death of younger Brazilians from the disease.

Brazil’s seven-day average daily death toll has risen to an all-time high of 2595, pushing the country’s total number of fatalities from the disease above 310,000.

Mr Bolsonaro, a right-wing former army captain, has spent much of the pandemic playing down the dangers of COVID-19, promoting unproven cures for the disease, and disparaging face masks. But as Brazil’s daily death toll has become the highest in the world over recent weeks, sparking calls for his impeachment, the president has bowed to demands from centrist politicians in exchange for their congressional support.

One of those demands has been the removal of Mr Araujo, a fierce critic of Beijing, whom opposition politicians have blamed for recent delays in shipments of vaccine inputs from China. In a blog post last year, Mr Araujo described the pandemic as being part of a global communist plot. “Using the pretext of the pandemic, this new communism is trying to create a world without nations, and without freedom,” he wrote.

An avid fan of former president Donald Trump, Mr Araujo is also seen as an obstacle in the country’s efforts to secure surplus vaccines from the Biden administration, political scientists said.

Mr Bolsonaro said that another diplomat, Carlos Alberto Franco França, would succeed him.

“(Mr Arajo] is being used as a scapegoat to protect the government,” said Rafael Cortez, a political scientist at Sao Paulo-based consulting firm Tendencias, adding that Mr Araújo’s ouster could help reduce pressure for Mr Bolsonaro’s own exit.

In Brazil, one of the world’s most closed economies, foreign policy has often been a low priority for government administrations. For Mr Bolsonaro, foreign policy was a way for his administration to define its ideological stance, rejecting the political left and forging conservative and nationalist alliances, said Mr Cortez.

The pandemic changed all that. Foreign policy, namely securing vaccine deals with foreign governments and firms, suddenly became a top priority, and one that was guided by practical, not ideological, concerns, he said.

However, political scientists said they remained sceptical that the ministerial shakeup would bring about real change. “If you play musical chairs in the cabinet but the policies don’t change, then this situation will continue,” said Carlos Melo, a political scientist at Brazil’s business school Insper.

Aside from spending millions of dollars on unproven cures for the disease — from antimalarial pills to an experimental Israeli nasal spray — the ministry also turned down an initial offer of 70 million vaccines from Pfizer last year. The ministry opposed the company’s demand for patients to sign liability waivers, a common request by the company.

Brazil’s states were left to fend for themselves. Sao Paulo, Brazil’s richest state, struck its own deal with the Chinese to test and produce Sinovac’s COVID-19 shot, CoronaVac, at the Butantan Institute, its biomedical research centre.

A fierce China critic himself and bitter rival of the state Governor Joao Doria, Mr Bolsonaro barred his health minister from buying CoronaVac and told his supporters it could disable or even kill them, without providing evidence. Several northern states have recently turned to Russia, signing purchases for the Sputnik V shot.

“We haven’t seen this anywhere else, where states or regional governments within a country are making purchases,” said Andrea Taylor, a researcher at Duke University who is studying vaccine contracts.

As the pandemic has raged, a plan by the ministry to produce the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was hit by delays in shipments of raw materials from China. Facing growing public pressure, Mr Bolsonaro backed down and his ministry ordered 100 million doses of CoronaVac.

The government also settled with Pfizer this month, signing up for 100 million doses by September, and bought another 38 million shots from Johnson & Johnson for delivery by December.

Elected in 2018 in the wake of the country’s biggest-ever corruption scandal, Mr Bolsonaro was popular precisely because of his lack of experience at national leadership, said Leonardo Barreto, a political scientist in Brasília. Voters viewed his “outsider” status as proof that he was honest, and not involved in the shady backroom deals they saw as necessary to get ahead in Brazilian politics.

But the same characteristics that got him elected have also made him a weak president for a pandemic, said Mr Barreto. “He has simply refused to lead,” said Mr Barreto, blaming the federal government’s lack of direction for the country’s chaotic response.

Mr Bolsonaro appointed his fourth health minister this month after the first two clashed with the president over his insistence on ignoring scientists’ advice. The third, an army general, is under investigation by the Supreme Court for alleged negligence over oxygen shortages in the Amazon in January that led scores of patients to suffocate in their hospital beds.

The Wall Street Journal