Homa publishes analysis on the pandemic of COVID-19 and Human Rights in the Brazilian and Latin American scenario based on the logic of corporate capture

Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO), on the 11^th of March of the current year, has officially declared a new disease as a pandemic, the COVID 19, caused by a type of coronavirus called Sars-Cov‑2.

Since then, we have seen a high daily increase of new cases in different countries of the world, and we have endure the implementation of isolation and social distancing measures, and in some cases even lockdowns, means which have become common, and the most succeeded and available today as a way of fighting the spread of the virus, lowering its death rate. The disease has a high contagion and hospitalization rate, which has been leading to the collapse of healthcare systems around the world.

The connected and interdependent world has given us ways of propagating the virus on a speed never seen before[1], and showed that the geopolitical frontiers are exclusively fictional, and does not contribute for the resolution of the situation, which by being global, it also requires a global solution[2].

However, in the context of this pandemic, be it on a country with adequate responses or not, it has left uncovered the deep inequality that the neoliberal capitalist society suffers with, and the vulnerable populations end up being victimized twice as much in this situation.

The objective of this text is to bring light to some of the questions that must be looked into with caution, in a time of COVID, highlighting some of the frailties that the global capitalism system has, and which are accentuated in this context, making it evident that the capture of public social policies by the argument of justifying the interest of corporations are likely to make the fighting against that multidimensional problem an even more infringing practice of the human rights, especially the rights of vulnerable groups.

[1]HARVEY, David. Política anticapitalista en tiempos de coronavirus. In: AGAMBEM, Giorgio et al. Sopa de Wuhan: pensamiento contemporáneo en tiempos de pandemias. Várias Cidades: Aspo, 2020. p. 83

[2] BUTLER, Judith. El capitalismo tiene sus límites. In: AGAMBEM, Giorgio et al. Sopa de Wuhan: pensamiento contemporáneo en tiempos de pandemias. Várias Cidades: Aspo, 2020. p. 59.