Between Science and populism: The Brazilian response to COVID-19 from the perspective of the legal determinants of Global Health

Abstract

A populist government has been held accountable for the 120 thousand preventable deaths in Brazil so far, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Domestic law has played a major role in the pandemic response, both as an opposing force and as an instrument of populism and denialism. The international legal sphere has, for its turn, provided an alternative of resistance against the latter. This piece assesses the Brazilian response in the light of the Legal Determinants of Health framework, put forward by The Lancet-O'Neill Institute of Georgetown University Commission on Global Health and Law. The two first sections unfold the origins and contents of the legal determinants of health. The third offers a brief account of the Brazilian experience during the pandemic, stressing the far-right populist agenda of the federal government. The last section explores the legal aspects of the response, in its domestic and international dimensions. Lastly, we pinpoint some preliminary conclusions we may draw from the pandemic experience thus far, in particular by the interplay of populism and global health law.