Abstract
The COVID-19 epidemic required immediate planning by the Brazilian Ministry of Health. The government’s actions showed contradictions between the presidency and the Ministry of Health. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the actions of the federal government in confronting the COVID-19 pandemic. Such actions resulted in a policy organized on three fronts: the role of governors; the false dilemma between the economy and health and; the militarization of the Ministry of Health, done by filling the staff with military personnel. In the initial four months after the first registered case of COVID-19, the Ministry of Health left the front line of the actions and the states conducted the primary measures of confrontation through the purchase of materials and services from the private sector. A false division was established between the sanitary measures and the economic recovery measures. The conduct of public health was passed on to the military, changing the technical-political field. The way of management based on the denial of the epidemic and the absence of proposals by the Ministry of Health was characterized by the abandonment of health protection measures, objectified in the question ‘So what?’, delivered by the president of the republic when asked about deaths in the Brazil.
COVID-19; health policy; public health