RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – A Brazilian government spokesman, on Wednesday, June 23, denied that there were irregularities in the negotiation for the Indian covid vaccine Covaxin and accused the pro-government congressman who revealed the case of “slandering” and “betraying” President Jair Bolsonaro.
The Minister of the General Secretariat of the Presidency, Onyx Lorenzoni, announced at a press conference that the government would file a formal complaint against congressman Luis Miranda (DEM) party, who confirmed on Wednesday that he had alerted Bolsonaro to alleged irregularities.
According to Miranda, last March, he delivered to Bolsonaro some documents identifying “wrong and corrupt things” in the negotiation for those vaccines, developed by the Indian laboratory Bharat Biotech.
“He betrayed President Bolsonaro, he betrayed Brazil, he joined all the evil that exists in Brazilian politics, and he is going to pay for everything he did this day,” Lorenzoni declared about the congressman.
The minister showed the Senate CPI documents related to the memorandum of intent signed by the Government last March with the laboratory Bharat Biotech, which contemplated purchasing 20 million doses, whose delivery would depend on prior approval of the vaccine by the National Health Regulator (Anvisa).
This regulatory agency initially denied the importation of Covaxin and finally authorized it this month, but limited to four million doses, which have not yet arrived in the country.
For this reason, according to Lorenzoni, “not a single cent” has been paid for these vaccines, nor has there been any attempt to irregularly advance the purchase of these antigens, as some members of the Senate investigative committee isuggested on Wednesday.
The minister assured that there are “serious suspicions” that the documents Miranda claims to have delivered to Bolsonaro “had been forged” and asked who the congressman could be serving with that “maneuver” to “scratch the president’s image.”
According to Lorenzoni, the Government “will not allow false narratives or repeated lies to be consolidated as truth”. It will go to court to denounce for “slander” the deputy and his brother Ricardo Miranda, head of imports of the Ministry of Health, who said he had received “pressure” for the purchase of Covaxin.
At the same press conference, the former Vice-Minister of Health, Colonel Elcio Franco, denied that businessman Francisco Maximiano, who is under investigation for corruption and mediated the negotiations between the Government and Bharat Biotech, had received illegal commissions for this work.
According to Franco, the negotiation was similar to the one carried out to acquire the Russian vaccine Sputnik V, which is likewise not applied in the country at the moment, and is being negotiated through a local intermediary.
Even so, the Senate Covid CPI, investigating the management of a pandemic that has already caused more than 500,000 deaths in Brazil, reaffirmed that next Friday, it will take a statement from Congressman Miranda and his brother to try to clarify the whole matter.
According to the rapporteur of the commission, Renan Calheiros, this is “grave information” that can take the investigation “beyond possible omissions of the Government” in the face of the pandemic, as it suggests “clear suspicions of corruption”.