Brazil Health minister resigns after less than a month in office
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Brazil’s outgoing health minister Nelson Teich said in a press briefing on Friday that he had decided to resign from his position, becoming the second person to leave the top public health position in less than a month in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
Teich, whom Bolsonaro had criticised as being too timid in the push to reopen the economy and advocate the use of anti-malarial drugs to fight the virus, said he had decided to resign from his position, Al Jazeera reports.
Teich thanked President Jair Bolsonaro for offering him the opportunity to work as minister and said he had given it his best but gave no reason for why he had chosen to resign.
Military members of the Brazilian cabinet are pushing for deputy health minister Eduardo Pazuello, an army general on active duty, to become the new health minister, making permanent his interim role, a government source told Reuters news agency. Teich struggled to reach consensus with state governments over guidelines on reopening their economies, as Bolsonaro has demanded. He expressed surprise at a recent press conference when he learned of a presidential decree allowing gyms, beauty parlours and hairdressers to open for business. The last straw for Teich may have been Bolsonaro’s insistence on a wider use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the novel coronavirus, which the minister has resisted due to a lack of scientific evidence.
Growth of the coronavirus outbreak in Brazil has set daily records in each of the past three days. The Health Ministry confirmed more than 15,000 new cases of the virus on Friday.
Brazil has confirmed more than 218,000 cases so far, on pace to pass Italy’s nearly 224,000 cases this weekend as it closes in quickly on Spain and the United Kingdom despite rolling out far fewer tests.
Brazil‘s death toll has risen by more than 800 per day to nearly 15,000 on Friday, as the crisis overwhelms hospitals in several cities and public cemeteries resort to mass graves.
“Let us pray,” Mandetta, the former health minister, said on Twitter after Teich’s resignation, calling for faith in science and support for Brazil‘s public health system.
Opposition and allied politicians criticized Bolsonaro’s intransigence on Friday. Lawmaker Marcelo Ramos of the centrist Liberal Party said the president would only accept a minister without regard for science-based public health policy.
Congressional opposition leader Alessandro Molon warned that Brazil was heading toward a public health catastrophe and said the president should be impeached.
“Bolsonaro does not want a technical minister, he wants someone who agrees with his ideological insanity, like ending social distancing and using chloroquine,” Molon, of the Brazilian Socialist Party, said in a statement.
Bolsonaro’s handling of the coronavirus has been widely criticized globally as he has shrugged off the severity of the disease and told Brazilians to ignore quarantine restrictions.
