Negacionismo como método, necropolítica e mistanásia na pandemia de Covid-19: no Brasil, a gestão da morte se revela

Abstract

As the number of deaths from Covid-19 grew in Brazil, former president Jair Bolsonaro intensified his denialist strategy by spreading fake news, mocking the sick, recommending ineffective medications and sabotaging all instruments to combat the pandemic, from recommending the use of masks to vaccination. The number of deaths in the country was four times higher than the world average per million inhabitants. Thousands of them could have been avoided or, at least, occurred without disrespecting the dignity of the human person. For this reason, they would be classified as mistanasia, a phenomenon that describes an avoidable and miserable death that results from the lack of access to health services or insufficient treatment to maintain life, for political, socioeconomic or scientific reasons. This research is based on the hypothetical-deductive argument that the Bolsonaro government's choice of scientific denialism was a form of necropolitics that resulted in thousands of deaths from mistanasia, especially among populations historically most exposed to the consequences of health and/or humanitarian crises. Thus, the aim is to go beyond the rationalities of health sciences, which tend to reduce populations to groups of “susceptibles,” “infected,” “survivors,” and “dead,” to identify points of intersection between the spread of the novel coronavirus and social markers such as social class, race, gender, level of education, and income. These are the central questions that guide this dissertation. Given these considerations, it is understood that the research is of the documentary type, with a qualitative approach, monographic procedure, and the investigation technique, data collection.