Luiz Henrique Mandetta, the Jair Bolsonaro administration’s first Health Minister, kicked off a series of highly-anticipated depositions in the Senate’s Covid hearings committee on Tuesday. While the inquiry was set up to investigate the federal government’s pandemic response, Mr. Mandetta’s nearly seven hours of testimony were ill-defined and lacked hard data. It certainly did not live up to the hype stirred by the local press in recent days.
However, his remarks did help strengthen the convictions of opposition lawmakers, who blame President Jair Bolsonaro’s Covid-19 denialism for Brazil’s pandemic catastrophe.
At one point in the afternoon, Mr. Mandetta...
