Covid inquiry yet to grill senator and ‘chloroquine brothers’ on ineffective drug scandal

The Brazilian Senate’s Covid inquiry is approaching its end, with the committee’s final report set to be delivered next week. In charge of drafting the inquiry’s recommendations, Senator Renan Calheiros has confirmed that he will request the indictment of President Jair Bolsonaro and potentially members of his family for their involvement in Brazil’s disastrous coronavirus response, which has led to over 600,000 deaths and counting.

But there are still many stones left to turn in the inquiry’s lines of investigation, with the hope that other legislative bodies and prosecution services will use the Senate’s initial findings to launch their own connected probes.

One such investigative gap regards one of the members of the Covid inquiry itself, center-right Senator Marcos do Val, who intermediated the donation of hydroxychloroquine by pharmaceutical laboratories to a private hospital in Espírito Santo state, which then distributed the ineffective coronavirus drugs to its patients.

The hospital in question is MedSênior, a facility run by an HMO of the same name and which is one more on the list of health services that administered shady tests using unproven Covid-19 drugs on senior citizens, as revealed by The Brazilian Report.

One senator’s involvement in distributing chloroquine

Last week, news website The Intercept Brasil published a leaked recording of a meeting between Mr. Do Val and a group of business owners, doctors, and politicians under investigation by the Covid inquiry for operating as a “parallel health ministry,” unofficially advising...