HCQ has now been removed by the US Federal Drug Administration's
list of drugs approved for use against Covid-19, yet both India and Brazil
continue to recommend its use as a treatment.
As Covid-19 spread
around the world in early 2020, hydroxychloroquine
(HCQ), an anti-malaria drug touted as a miracle cure by the US president Donald
Trump, triggered a global, polarised debate with significant geopolitical
impacts.
The debate around
HCQ in the United States was widely covered in international English-language
media, but the controversy swirling around the same drug in Brazil and India —
two countries where partisanship is equally as rife — has received less
attention.
The countries
deployed drastically different responses to the Covid-19
pandemic. India declared a national lockdown on March 25, while Brazil never
instituted one. In both countries, however, the HCQ debate quickly became a
useful rhetorical lever to push nationalist positions. Even as HCQ's efficacy
remained unproven, its use was aggressively touted by Brazilian president Jair
Bolsonaro and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.
HCQ has now been
removed by the US Federal Drug Administration's list of drugs approved for use
against Covid-19, yet both India and Brazil continue to recommend its use as a
treatment.
Brazil and India
have plenty in common. Both are middle-income economies and large democracies
that have elected far-right nationalist leaders in the past decade. Modi and
his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have galvanized support around
Hindu-nationalist sentiment in an attempt to raise India’s profile as an
international powerhouse. Brazil elected Bolsonaro president in 2018 on a
platform that blended tough-on-crime-and-corruption rhetoric with hardline
cultural conservatism and ultra-liberal economic policy that promised sweeping
labor and environmental deregulation.
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