Governing COVID-19 without government in Brazil: Ignorance, neoliberal authoritarianism, and the collapse of public health leadership

ABSTRACT

Brazil’s governance of the COVID-19 pandemic has been described as nothing short of tragic by several commentators. President Jair Bolsonaro’s dangerous brew of neoliberal authoritarianism, science denialism and ableism has plunged this country into catastrophe. In this article we argue that this form (or lack) of public health governance can best be described as governance without (central) government. We begin with an overview of public health governance in the country before introducing the main theoretical concepts that guide our analysis, namely the notions of ‘government by exception’ and ‘strategic ignorance’. Finally, we sketch the main features of this emerging form of (non)governance of COVID-19. We highlight the new forms of solidarity and mutual aid that have emerged in favelas and Indigenous communities, which have stepped in to fill the void left by a limited federal presence. The article concludes by reflecting on what this collapse of public health reveals about the limitations of democratic governance in the age of Bolsonaro.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• neoliberal authoritarianism
• strategic ignorance
• Bolsonaro
• Brazil

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the journal’s four anonymous reviewers for detailed and helpful comments on an earlier version of this article, as well as Ilana Löwy and Javier Moscoso for insightful feedback. Thanks, as well, to Eugene Raikhel for publishing our initial commentary on this subject in Somatosphere, and to GPH editor Richard Parker for shepherding this article through the evaluation process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ableism is a term used by critical disability studies scholars to refer to a

network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human. Disability then is cast as a diminished state of being human. (Campbell, 2001, p. 44; quoted in Campbell, 2009, p. 5)

Ableism is often implicated in discussions of ageism but they should be understood as conceptually distinct. As Chivers explains, ‘old people are not necessarily disabled, and disabled people are not necessarily old' (Chivers, 2020, p. 51).

2 Brazil is a federal republic made up of three orders of government: ‘the central or Union government; 26 state governments and the Federal District government; and more than 5,500 municipal governments’. The President is the head of state and head of government (Forum of Federations, http://www.forumfed.org/countries/brazil/)

3 For helpful overviews of Brazil’s public health history, see Hochman (2013); Lima, Edler, et al. (2005); Teixeira et al. (2018).

4 Yellow fever did become endemic in the North and Northeast of the country, however. This led to the intervention of scientists of the Rockefeller Foundation to eradicate the disease. While these scientists acknowledged the complexity of tropical diseases, they focused on interrupting the transmission chain. They soon realised that the pathology was associated with forest subsistence in the country and concentrated on control of mosquitoes that propagate in areas with high housing density and on the production of a vaccine (Löwy, 2006; Benchimol, 2001).

5 For an historical overview, see Lima, Edler, et al., 2005.

6 For an important discussion of ‘unknown knowns’ or ‘public secrets’ that do not necessarily involve the suppression of knowledge, see Geissler, 2013.