After 965 uninterrupted working days, the consortium of press vehicles completes its mission to ensure transparency on the impact of the coronavirus and vaccination. The consortium was formed in June 2020 when Jair Bolsonaro’s (PL) government tried to omit population data and delay bulletins about the disease.
The end of the consortium does not mean that the Covid19 pandemic is over. Case and death disclosures will continue to be made by each press office. A daily review of the data by the vehicles involved in the project g1, O Globo, Extra, Esstadão, Sheet and UOL.
“The consortium has fulfilled the role of the specialized press to inform the public about an important issue, while the federal government has neglected this task,” said Sérgio Dávila, editorinchief of the Sheet.
In recent months, the data from the federal states and the federal government have proven to be reliable. And they point to a situation that epidemiologists consider to be under control, although it requires increased immunization rates and other preventive measures.
The press vehicles continue to be vigilant for fluctuations in rates and remain committed to educating the population about the disease.
For more than two and a half years, more than a hundred journalists from the consortium’s vehicles worked together every day to collect the numbers of people infected and killed by Covid, as well as the number of those vaccinated by the state health departments. The data, which is always consolidated at 8 p.m., was published daily by the participating vehicles and fed thousands of journalistic content in text and video.
“The consortium was an undertaking that involved more than a hundred journalists in those two and a half years. It was only possible thanks to the professionalism of the press vehicles. Professional journalism requires a sense of urgency, the ability to accurately gather relevant information, and agility, and showing it factually and vividly,” says Renato Franzini, Managing Director of g1. “I want to thank all these journalists. And also to all employees who continued to collect and disseminate epidemiological data and fulfilled their functional duty.”
The consortium first came about as a reaction from the press to the delay in releasing the data: it was set up by the Ministry of Health daily at 5 p.m. (led by thenminister Luiz Henrique Mandetta) or at 7 p.m. (led by Nelson Teich’s management) . When a record 1,349 deaths were recorded in 24 hours on June 3, 2020, Minister Eduardo Pazuello only released the data at 9:45 p.m. The following day, the bulletin was not published on the ministry’s website until 10 p.m., with a new record of 1,471 deaths.
“When the federal government’s transparency vacuum seemed hopeless, with the lack of disclosure of numbers and a complete lack of standards in the disclosure of deaths and Covid cases, with a country with no plan to fight the disease and no available vaccine, we have helped to make it reliable Data so that Brazil does not remain blind. It is the duty of the state to maintain the transparency of its policies. The consortium’s cessation of collection of Covid data is a vote of confidence, but with the message we will be alert to possible inconsistencies,” said Alexandre Gimenez, general manager of News, Economy and TAB at UOL.
In addition to the delay, there were other initiatives against transparency. The official bulletin began highlighting the cases and deaths recorded that day, but without the total number of dead and infected. Cases registered as “recovered” even though no cure for the disease was known at the time also received increasing attention.
Bolsonaro went as far as saying that not disclosing the number of deaths from Covid was “good for Brazil” and confirmed his intention to delay the data when declaring that “an article in Jornal Nacional has ended”. “It doesn’t matter by whom [a ordem para modificar o horário], it’s fair to go at 10pm, the data is fully consolidated. On the contrary, you don’t have to rush to go to Globo,” he said at the time.
The government’s position has been heavily criticized by experts and international vehicles. Proper dissemination of numbers is important for public policy planning and public health security.
The standard of best practice was the distribution of newsletters with investigated, confirmed and discarded cases and data such as the onset of symptoms and the closure of each case (whether due to hospital discharge or death).
“When the Brazilian state failed to meet its most basic information obligations in the face of an epidemic, the press joined forces in an unprecedented action to fill the void left by official incompetence. competitive, which guarantees a variety of visions. We hope that moments like the one that necessitated the formation of the consortium will never be repeated in Brazil,” said Eurípedes Alcântara, director of journalism at Esstadão.
When the consortium of press vehicles was formed and began to publish the data obtained directly from the 26 federal states and the federal district, the federal government backtracked and again published the pandemic figures regularly and at a time compatible with journalistic work. Despite this, the consortium continued to work in the face of the risk of another data failure.
With daily monitoring of the crisis, milestones of the pandemic were recorded, such as when the death toll in the country reached 200,000 on January 7, 2021, during the drama from the lack of oxygen in Manaus. A little over a hundred days later, in April 2021, the 400,000 death mark was reached. The three major waves of death in mid2020 and early 2021 and 2022 were identified. Currently the rolling average of deaths per day is around 70. Comparable to what happened two years ago when there were more than 3,000 deaths per day.
In addition to cases and deaths, on January 21, 2021, the consortium began disclosing vaccination coverage with one or two doses to the population. And as of September 2021, booster shots are included. More recently, it has started to monitor the immunization coverage of children aged 3 to 11 years whose vaccination start has been delayed in the country.
For promoting transparency at a time of high public health risks, the consortium has received recognition from institutions such as the ANJ (National Association of Newspapers) Press Freedom Award and Media of the Year from Aberje (Brazilian Association for Corporate Communications). .
“The formation of the consortium was a historic milestone for the Brazilian press at a time when public power was lacking. Together we understood the critical moment and put the competition aside to provide the country with a reliable service that researchers, doctors and authorities could define, prioritize and save lives,” said Alan Gripp, editor of O Globo newspaper.