Eduardo Pazuello

He was Minister of Health from 2020 to 2021 and has been a federal deputy for Rio de Janeiro since 2023. He was named in the 2026 Rio de Janeiro governor's race but did not stand in it: the PL's candidate was Douglas Ruas, and Pazuello ran for federal deputy.

Career

Pazuello was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1963 and graduated from the Agulhas Negras Military Academy in 1984 as an intendance officer. He coordinated Army troops at the 2016 Rio Olympics and, from 2018, the Army's Operation Acolhida for Venezuelan refugees in Roraima, and was Roraima's state finance secretary from 2018 to 2019. He commanded the 12th Military Region in Manaus from January 2020, became executive secretary of the Ministry of Health in April 2020, acting minister in May and minister in September, and left on 23 March 2021. He headed the Secretariat of Strategic Affairs from June 2021 to April 2022. He joined the PL in 2022 and was elected federal deputy for Rio with 205,324 votes. In 2026 he ran again for federal deputy; Radar do Voto lists him as elected with 146,148 votes.

Positions

Pazuello sits with the PL, whose English Wikipedia article lists Bolsonarism, national conservatism and economic liberalism among its ideologies. As health minister he authorised chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 treatment in May 2020, and in October 2020 he opposed the purchase of the CoronaVac vaccine, a position President Jair Bolsonaro reversed, according to Wikipedia. He is an ally of Bolsonaro, whose government he served.

Controversies

The Senate's COVID-19 inquiry (CPI) accused Pazuello in 2021 of five offences over the oxygen shortage in Manaus in January 2021: prevarication, epidemic resulting in death, irregular use of public funds, false report of a crime and crime against humanity, according to Congresso em Foco. As of October 2022 the matter was under inquiry at the Supreme Federal Court, which had allowed the Federal Police to keep investigating. Wikipedia reports that a court in Amazonas acquitted him in May 2022 in an administrative-improbity case over the same crisis. In 2021 the Army closed a disciplinary case over his appearance at a Bolsonaro rally without finding a violation.

Summarised automatically from the linked sources. Wikipedia (English) · Wikipedia (Portuguese) · Radar do Voto · Congresso em Foco · InvestNews · Wikipedia (English), Liberal Party

Photo: Palácio do Planalto, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons (cropped)