Banca de DEFESA: Ana Paula Pimentel Jacob

The “Chloroquine hype” an anthropology of the scientific production of Kit-covid medicines from the Brazilian Southeast

pharmaceutical experimentation; COVID-19; pandemic; medicines; KitCOVID; early treatment.

The COVID-19 pandemic had numerous consequences in the Brazilian context. Markedly unequal, people lived in different ways in this continental country and along with this some quick solutions appeared, mainly in speeches by public figures such as the former president of the republic and other health professionals. Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, Nitazoxamide or Annita, all medicines included in the Kit-COVID, were some of the immediate bets in response to the context of the global health crisis. Since then, a series of debates about forms of treatment and dealing with a pandemic have been published in the newspapers, creating an infodemic scenario. This was characterized by a profusion of messages, scientific discoveries monitored in real time and new findings about an unknown illness. Instigated by these events, I began an investigation via 3 newspapers and news: CNN Brasil, Folha de São Paulo e Jornal Matinal, with the aim of better understanding the magical solutions represented by medicines, based on Toniol (2020), and its consequences in the Brazilian context. This work was splitted into two stages: a documentary stage, which consists of news analysis and another field trip, which consists of interviews carried out with scientists. From reading and systematizing news from media outlets, I understand that there is a certain appropriation of narratives within the sciences and their dissemination in these media. Furthermore, monitoring scientific findings at different times gave rise to more or less credibility for new treatments for COVID-19. At first, in March 2020, Hydroxychloroquine revealed itself as having potential for treating the disease, but as of June of the same year, the suspicion was not confirmed and became “proven ineffective”. In this sense, the scientific field could respond to the productions and reproductions of these statements. Curious about the possibility of reflecting on the scientific manufacture of the Kit-COVID medicines within the space of the scientists who researched the substances. In total, I carried out 28 interviews with 26 different researchers between September 2022 and February 2023. Most of them were located in the southeast of the country, due to the large record of research via Plataforma Brasil of experiments coordinated by scientists from this region. The researchers reflected on the loopholes in the regulation of experiments with medicines already on the market, the relationship between science and politics and the conduct of some health professionals in their clinics. There is a set of factors that cause a medicine to be advertised and thus pose a risk to public health, which was early involved in a sequence of medical prescriptions for substances still undergoing scientific experimentation