Marcelo Queiroga, who participated today in a conference in the Portuguese capital, at the invitation of the president of the Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon, highlighted, in an interview with Lusa, that the role of Portuguese cooperation with Brazil both in the most critical phase of the pandemic in that country and now and considered this “demonstration of a great solidarity that unites” the two countries.

The Brazilian Government official explained that his visit to Lisbon had several objectives, including discussing possibilities for cooperation between the two countries, one of which being organ transplantation.

For now, it takes the guarantee that the Portuguese Government will donate 400,000 units of the Astra Zeneca vaccine to Brazil as promised.

“My visit here, to the University of Lisbon, is to discuss aspects of the pandemic with the academic community of the University of Lisbon, which has a very strong partnership with Brazil,” said the minister.

However, he recalled that today there are “partnerships with the federal university of Rio de Janeiro and the university of São Paulo for the qualification of doctors trained in Brazil”, which are very important for these health professionals.

For the Brazilian minister and doctor, a “double degree is a great opportunity for Brazilian doctors, to have a degree here in Portugal and also access to the European Community”.

In addition, he stressed, “there is a very strong scientific collaboration” between the two countries, “which is perennial, not only during the time of the pandemic”.

“There are great similarities between the Portuguese health system and the Brazilian health system, the health systems with universal access”, he added.

According to the minister, during a pandemic, there was collaboration between the health systems of the two countries in the scientific area, as well as partnerships with the Portuguese government, which donated intubation kits and medicines.

The minister added that today there was a meeting with “researchers and the technical group in the area of ​​transplantation” and that the two will collaborate in this field.

“Portugal has a very well-structured national transplant system and Brazil has the largest public transplant program in the world,” he stressed.

In addition, “naturally, Brazil is a country with a well-publicized and very heterogeneous health system, and here in Portugal it takes advantage of organs with great efficiency”, he stressed.

Therefore, the two countries will “collaborate so that the positive points of each system can be maximized, bringing benefits to Portuguese and Brazilian citizens”, he concluded.

The participation of Marcelo Queiroga in a conference, at an invitation to the president of the Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon, has been much criticized by some residents in Portugal, who consider the government’s presence an affront to the fatal victims of covid-19.

Dozens of Brazilians gathered today in front of the Santa Maria hospital, in Lisbon, to protest against the presence of the Brazilian minister of Health at that conference on the country’s response to the covid-19 pandemic.

The Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (CPI) on the management of covid-19, taking place in the Brazilian Senate, votes this afternoon on the final report calling for the indictment of the President, Jair Bolsonaro, for nine crimes and the deepening of investigations against other suspects.

With 1,180 pages, the document presented last week by senator Renan Calheiros recommends the indictment of another 65 people and two companies suspected of crimes during a covid-19 pandemic, which has already caused more than 605,000 deaths and 21.7 million people. infected in Brazil.

Requests for indictment will be forwarded to the Federal Public Ministry, the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) and the Federal Supreme Court (STF), if the report is approved by a majority of the CPI members.

The CPI report can also be sent to multilateral entities such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

Most of the accusations are related to denial actions, suspicions of corruption and omission regarding the new coronavirus and vaccines, which would have increased the number of deaths in Brazil.

Marcelo Queiroga is one of those targeted by the investigation by the parliamentary investigation commission which, over the past few months, has evaluated failures and omissions in the actions of the Brazilian government in managing the covid-19 pandemic.

The visit of the Brazilian minister to Portugal – but also to the United Kingdom, where he travels to visits to universities and Oxford and other institutions, with the signing of protocols also expected – was news in the Brazilian press, with the newspaper O Globo questioning the University of Lisbon on the maintenance of the invitation after having been distinguished as a characteristic of the investigation of the parliamentary investigation commission (CPI).

Brazil has more than 600,000 deaths associated with covid-19 and has had about 22 million cases of infection by the new coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic.