Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Thursday withdrew for the first time on the benefits he has repeatedly promoted of chloroquine, accepted that the drug may have “zero” efficacy against COVID and said: “At least I don’t have killed no one. “
The far-right leader, who was a staunch supporter of chloroquine use and even took it when he caught covid in July last year, accepted it could be a placebo.
“Maybe the front is saying that the option (for chloroquine) is zero, that it’s a placebo. Well, patience, excuse me, by the way, at least I didn’t kill anyone,” he said during his live speech. held weekly. Thursday on social media.
Since the pandemic hit Brazil in March last year, Bolsonaro has repeatedly recommended the use of hydroxychloroquine to fight covid, a controversial antimalarial whose effectiveness has not been fully proven by science.
The defense of chloroquine also cost him the job of two of his health ministers who did not consider it appropriate in the fight against the virus.
The president’s obsession with chloroquine was such that he ordered its mass production, and antimalarial is part of a group of drugs that the Ministry of Health has decided to apply to coronavirus patients as part of what the office and Bolsonaro himself call as “early treatment”.
According to official data, the government has already spent more than 100 million reais (about $ 20 million) on both hydroxychloroquine and other drugs whose efficacy against coronavirus is doubted by much of the scientific community.
Last week, the State Court of Auditors, the body that oversees public spending in Brazil, asked the government for an explanation for the spending.
Judge Benjamín Zymler, a member of the Court, made a well-founded request, among other factors, that the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) not authorize the use of these medicines against covid-19.