Brazil’s federal police indicted the country’s former president Jair Bolsonaro for suspected fraud on his vaccination records, two sources related to the matter said on Tuesday.
An investigation by the country’s comptroller general’s office had already shown that Bolsonaro’s vaccination records were false.
In addition to Bolsonaro, one of his former aides, Mauro Cid, who was arrested in May last year as part of the investigation, was also indicted.
Bolsonaro was indicted on charges of entering false data into the country’s Unified Health System (SUS) and forming a criminal organization.
The former president reiterated that he had not taken the COVID-19 vaccine and said he was calm.
“It’s a selective investigation. I’m calm, I don’t owe anything,” said Bolsonaro.
“The world knows that I didn’t take the vaccine.”
The Supreme Court released the police’s indictment on Tuesday that alleges Bolsonaro and 16 others inserted false information into the public health database to make it appear as though the then-president, his 12-year-old daughter and several others in his circle had received the COVID-19 vaccine.
During his tenure, Bolsonaro repeatedly downplayed the importance of immunization and social distancing measures during the pandemic, which killed more than 700,000 people in Brazil.
His administration ignored several emails from pharmaceutical company Pfizer offering to sell Brazil tens of millions of shots in 2020 and openly criticized a move by Sao Paulo state’s then-Gov. João Doria to buy vaccines from Chinese company Sinovac when no jabs were otherwise available.
Brazil’s prosecutor-general’s office will have the final say on whether to use the police indictment to file charges against Bolsonaro at the Supreme Court. It stems from one of several investigations targeting Bolsonaro, who governed between 2019 and 2022.
Police accuse Bolsonaro and his aides of tampering with the health ministry’s database shortly before he traveled to the U.S. in December 2022, two months after he lost his reelection bid to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Bolsonaro needed a certificate of vaccination to enter the U.S., where he remained for the final days of his term and the first months of Lula’s term.
If convicted for falsifying health data, the 68-year-old politician could spend up to 12 years behind bars, and as little as two years, according to legal analyst Zilan Costa. The maximum jail time for a charge of criminal association is four years, he said.
Bolsonaro retains staunch allegiance among his base, as shown by an outpouring of support last month with an estimated 185,000 people clogging Sao Paulo’s main boulevard to decry what they — and the former president — characterize as political persecution.
Brazil’s top electoral court has already ruled Bolsonaro ineligible until 2030, on the grounds that he abused his power during the 2022 campaign and cast unfounded doubts on the country’s electronic voting system.
Other investigations include one seeking to determine whether Bolsonaro tried to sneak two sets of expensive diamond jewelry into Brazil and prevent them from being incorporated into the presidency’s public collection. Another relates to his alleged involvement in the January 8, 2023 uprising in capital Brasilia, soon after Lula took power, that resembled the Capitol riot in Washington two years prior. He has denied wrongdoing in both cases.
By Agencies
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