Brazilian COVID Crisis Grows Into a Corruption Scandal

Following an explosive set of allegations in Brazil, the probe of Jair Bolsonaro's COVID response has gone from a exploration of Brazil's failure to stop the coronavirus to a mounting threat to his presidency. Protests are growing in the streets. Bolsonaro is facing a criminal investigation. Some have questioned not only whether he can win next year's presidential election - but whether he'll still be president by the time it arrives.

At the center of the political drama is a classic corruption scandal. There are allegations of kickbacks, financial irregularities and an overarching question: What did the president know, and what did he do about it?

The Brazilian government, after stalling several vaccine purchases to haggle and fret over costs, made a harried deal this year to buy an unapproved Indian vaccine at a suspiciously expensive price. Documents submitted to congressional investigators showed Brazil paid more than 10 times the price that was originally quoted by Indian pharmaceutical company Bharat Biotech for its vaccine, Covaxin. The deal was suspended last week.

The contrast between how government officials approached the Covaxin deal with how slowly they acquired other vaccines sparked corruption concerns inside the health ministry - concerns that Bolsonaro is accused of ignoring after he was informed.

Earlier this month, the Brazilian supreme court took the extraordinary step of authorizing a criminal investigation into Bolsonaro. Congressional investigators say there's no evidence to suggest Bolsonaro informed relevant authorities of the suspected malfeasance, which in Brazil could constitute a crime of dereliction by a public servant.

"This isn't a suspicion," Omar Aziz, a federal senator and leader of the inquiry, told the Brazilian newspaper Globo. "This is a fact. [Bolsonaro] hasn't disproven this. He didn't send anything to the police. . . . For any public servant, this would be a dereliction."

Bolsonaro, who still retains enough political support to fend off calls for his impeachment, has tried several tactics to distance himself from the scandal. He has denied any misconduct - both in the purchase of Covaxin and in his own behavior. "I'm incorruptible." Then he claimed ignorance. "I didn't even know how the Covaxin deal was going." Finally, he has worked to undermine the probe itself: "an embarrassment."

The accelerating momentum of the probe has brought the right-wing nationalist into the most vulnerable chapter of his presidency and injected an extraordinary degree of political uncertainty into a deeply polarized country reeling from record unemployment, a widening hunger crisis and the coronavirus deaths of more than a half-million people.

Bruno Brandão, the executive director of Transparency International in Brazil, said several past scandals during the Bolsonaro presidency did little to chip away at his support among anti-corruption hawks. But this one could be different.  "The dirtiness of corruption in the middle of a humanitarian tragedy is something more shocking and much closer to people's real suffering," he said. "Maybe indignation will finally overtake indifference."