Key takeaways from day one of Covid hearings testimony

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 recalled a meeting with the president, days before being booted out of office, in which one of the participants bore an unofficial document — not on government letterhead — which proposed altering the label of antimalarial drug chloroquine to include recommendations for its use against Covid-19. For months, Mr. Bolsonaro championed the drug as a “possible cure” against the disease — a claim debunked by scientific evidence.

According to Mr. Mandetta, Antonio Barra Torres — head of federal health regulator Anvisa — dismissed the...