Public health, science and society: challenges and perspectives

Abstract

the dissemination of knowledge about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on science and society. The institutional and organizational effects associated with sanitary control measures are presented and discussed by articles, essays, and reviews in this special thematic issue.The first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic challenged the classic model of coping with communicable diseases due to the absence of strictly pharmacological actions in the public health portfolio: vaccines and antivirals were not available to control the incidence and reduce the lethality caused by SARS-CoV-2. At that moment, it was left to the field of public health to propose social distancing measures of different degrees that paralyzed the economic activity and affected, in particular, vulnerable populations, the poor, women, and the working class in general. The pandemic deepened the social inequalities experienced in Brazil and in the world. The absence of public policies to prevent COVID-19 and the dismantling of legislations, as well as social protection networks, significantly impacted the health of workers in several categories 1 .The implementation of massive social distancing measures, including quarantine, exposed scientific arguments and transformed government policy for the pandemic into an arena disputed by denialist political leaders, such as President Bolsonaro, messianic opinion makers in the new social media and, paradoxically, sectors of the medical profession. The transitory lack of technological solutions to solve the pandemic has increased active denialism in relation to the effectiveness of biomedicine, a fact still observed on a disturbing scale, in the smear campaign of vaccines against the new coronavirus.The denialist decisions of the Brazilian president for the control and mitigation of the COVID-19 pandemic also subjected the national cooperative federative arrangement to a monumental stress. He became internationally recognized as an example of a leader who responded chaotically, irresponsibly, and ineptly to the threat of the pandemic, vetoing the lockdown, promoting ineffective drugs, and spreading vaccine hesitancy 2 . This finding motivated the establishment of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI) in the Federal Senate, in early 2021, to investigate the conduct of the Federal Executive and the Ministry of Health (MS) during the first cycles of the pandemic. The CPI listed the deliberate initiatives of the Brazilian president, who subordinated the MS to his denialist