Anti-vaccine discourse growing in Brazil’s far-right rhetoric

In February, the Brazilian Senate held a public hearing on children’s Covid vaccination programs, a favorite moral panic issue of the anti-vaccine far-right close to former President Jair Bolsonaro that survived and thrived into Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s new term.

The renewed debate has reached all three branches of government, as lawmakers hold hearings and file court petitions, while some right-wing governors have followed through in health and education policies.

One of the participants in the Senate hearing was U.S. physician Peter McCullough, a former proponent of hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of Covid, who once told Texas lawmakers that healthy people under the age of 50 had no reason to be vaccinated and falsely claimed that there was no evidence of the asymptomatic spread of the disease.

Conservative Senator Luis Carlos Heinze lamented the federal government’s lack of attention to the international list of anti-vaxxers at the hearing.

“Any medical expert could be listening to the American, European, Italian, and Brazilian experts who are speaking here today (…) It’s not just the [health] minister, but there should be people here who have the capacity to discern what we’re talking about,” he said.

The hearing was requested by Senator Eduardo Girão, the main champion of culture-war issues raised by the far-right. These include debates on “judicial activism,” a dog-whistle term for judges providing checks and balances to politicians. 

A member of the libertarian Novo party, Mr. Girão also presided over a hearing held in late 2022, in which pro-Bolsonaro lawmakers openly defended overturning that year’s election. Weeks later, hordes of radicals stormed government offices in Brasília in an attempt to create the conditions for a military coup.

Perhaps more relevant to the topic at hand, Mr. Girão has also used the Senate’s chambers to celebrate World UFO...