Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and more than a dozen others have been accused by federal police of falsifying their COVID-19 vaccine records in order to travel to the U.S. during the pandemic.
Police detective Fabio Alvarez Shor said the former president and 16 others changed their vaccine status to “issue their respective (vaccination) certificates and use them to cheat current health restrictions.”
According to an investigation, “several false insertions” were discovered between November 2021 and December 2022 in addition to “many actions of using fraudulent documents,” Shor said, according to the Associated Press.
As The Wall Street Journal notes, Brazil’s comptroller general’s office determined in January that the former president's vaccination records were false.
The detective said in the indictment that Bolsonaro’s aide-de-camp, Mauro Cid, told investigators the former president asked him to insert the false data into the system for both himself and his daughter. Cid also said he delivered the vaccination certificates to Bolsonaro personally.
During the pandemic, Bolsonaro was one of the few world leaders who railed against the vaccine. He openly flouted health restrictions and encouraged other Brazilians to follow his example. His administration ignored several offers from pharmaceutical company Pfizer to sell Brazil tens of millions of shots in 2020, and he openly criticized a move by Sao Paulo state’s governor to buy vaccines from Chinese company Sinovac when no other doses were available.
Brazil’s prosecutor-general’s office will have the final say on whether to use the indictment to file charges against Bolsonaro at the Supreme Court. The case stems from one of several investigations targeting Bolsonaro, who governed from 2019 to 2022. (AP)
An attorney for Bolsonaro called the indictment "political persecution."
“When he was president, he was completely exempted from showing any kind of certificate on his trips. This is political persecution and an attempt to void the enormous political capital that has only grown,” attorney Fábio Wajngarten said, reports AP.
During an interview in May 2023, after police had raided his home as part of the investigation, Bolsonaro said he was never asked for a vaccine certificate when he traveled to the U.S., "so there is no fraud on my part." Plus, as head of state, he said he was exempted from vaccine mandates on travelers.
The police accusations come as the authorities narrow in on the former president in a series of criminal cases, including accusations by police that Bolsonaro had plotted a military takeover of the country in the run-up to the 2022 presidential elections.
As part of the same investigation, Bolsonaro also stands accused of encouraging his supporters to try to remove da Silva from power after he had taken office in January 2023.
Bolsonaro has denied the existence of a coup attempt. “Not one soldier was deployed in Brasília,” he said in a television interview last month.
Thousands of Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed Brazil’s Congress, Presidential Palace and the Supreme Court one week into da Silva’s new government in January 2023, many demanding a military intervention to bring Bolsonaro back to power.
In June last year, Brazil’s electoral court barred Bolsonaro from running for office again until 2030, leading his supporters to march by the thousands last month on São Paulo’s main Paulista Avenue. (WSJ)
If convicted of falsifying health data, Bolsonaro could face up to 12 years in prison, according to legal analysts.