Osmar Terra is the most likely candidate for the "hand in the nose" strategy.

By Moisés Mendes, for the Journalists for Democracy 

The conspirator increasingly poised to replace Luiz Henrique at the Ministry of Health is Osmar Terra. No one has been as wrong as Terra in making predictions about the pandemic.

This capacity to err, in the name of total liberation, with the end of isolation and the repeal of trade restrictions, is what qualifies him to be Bolsonaro's minister.

Terra is a doctor who thinks and speaks like a boring, lay activist of the far-right on social media. He speaks and writes about data without any scientific basis, analyzes contagion curves as if he were Bolsonaro, and spreads fake news as if he were Carluxo. This disastrous combination shapes his qualifications.

Mandetta's replacement could be the oncologist and immunologist Nise Yamaguchi. Perhaps it will be the anesthesiologist Luciano Dias Azevedo. And it could even be the director of Anvisa, also a doctor, Antônio Barra Torres, the first name considered when the first speculations arose that Mandetta would not survive.

Yamaguchi and Azevedo are insistent defenders of the widespread use of hydroxychloroquine, and Torres aligns himself with Bolsonaro in advocating for a general release of drugs in cities, without any kind of control. They may all be wrong, but none of them have said even 10% of the inconsistencies that Terra presents with scientific composure.

The most famous piece of nonsense is the recent prediction that the coronavirus would kill fewer people than the common flu in Rio Grande do Sul in 2019, that is, just under a thousand people, according to his calculations. Terra got it all wrong. The common flu killed fewer than one hundred people in his state last year, and the coronavirus has already killed more than a thousand in Brazil.

There's another, less publicized line of reasoning among the information that seems to come from the mouth of an old man. It's his argument against conducting tests. Terra said in an interview with Radio Jovem Pan that there's no point in getting tested now, because a person who tests negative today could turn up infected next week.

Of course you can. The test exists to identify the level of contagion at that moment and the situation of that person, so that their case can be treated individually and collectively, even if days later.

The test is a snapshot of the present, so that actions can be taken to prevent what might occur if the test did not exist.

What other doctor can say that the tests are invalid because they don't capture everything that will happen in the future of the person being tested? Only Osmar Terra thinks he knows the future.

Those who followed Terra's management of the health sector in Rio Grande do Sul, during the government of Yeda Crusius (2007-2010), can provide detailed information about his past, when he wasn't a pandemic predictor. The doctor was a mediocre secretary.

They say Terra may have lost points after being caught by CNN (was it really caught?) in confidences with Onyx Lorenzoni while his cell phone was on. The conversation in which they plot Mandetta's downfall may, on the contrary, gain him points.

The more wrong his analyses are, the more disastrous his political performance, the more he conspires against Mandetta, the more Terra qualifies to become minister.

In his first press conference, with that look of determination, knowledge, and energy, he will be able to explain why, after making mistakes manipulating theories, he believes he will finally get it right in practice.

Terra, due to his accumulation of egregious errors, is the worst name for public health at a time when the pandemic is spreading, because in his mind the outbreak should be going away. But the hapless futurist is the best name for Bolsonaro's "hand-in-the-nose" strategy.