Etnobioética, autonomia universitária e pesquisa em humanos no Brasil do covid-19

Abstract

OBJECTIVES. To discuss the elements of a bioethics of research (with technological innovation) on humans in Brazil from COVID-19. And, particularly: a) speculate on the integrity of bioethics at its birth, in light of the similarities that permeate the primordial writing of Paul Max Fritz Jahr and that of van Rensselaer Potter; b) review ethics applied to human research in Brazil, under the prism of the transition between Resolutions (CNS) No. 196/96 and No. 466/12, and the threat of extinction of the CEP/CONEP system; c) understand the ethnobioethical resistance, expression of the autonomy of Brazilian public universities and related entities against the official negationism throughout the coronacrisis (2020-2022); d) discuss suborbital tourism as an analytical reference to the risks of human research without a bioethical control such as the REC/CONEP system; e) punctuate the federal and anti-scientific decision to continue investing in “early treatment” based on chloroquine, after February 2021, to the detriment of the MMR vaccine; f) explain how the doubt about the origin of the SARSCoV-2 virus puts in check the innovation/patenting of specific vaccines. METHODS. From the reading and critical updating of the basic text of the bioethicist Maria da Gloria Gomes, we revisit not only the primordial writing of Jahr and Potter, in an archeology of their equivalences, but also the plot of the transition between Resolutions (CNS) No. 196/96 and No. 466/12, which coexists, since the PL No. 200/2015, with the anti-democratic threat of extinction of the CEP/CONEP network. Continuous act, by autofictional strategy, of Camusian inspiration, we elect speeches/actions delator of presidential negationism and of agents of the first echelon (2018-2022 quadrennium), to underline the policing to university autonomy and democracy during the pandemic zoonosis, imagining places (Pequi, folkloric successor of Brazil; Tijuca River; Kubitschek District), characters (Obtusus-Queen, Obtusus-Operaries) and landscape (academic front) that mirror a dramatization of national reality. A combination of the methods “content analysis” and “discourse analysis” permeated the thesis, both being options that harmonize with the conjunctural demands of the objectives. RESULTS. The situation of the preferred object of the Brazilian school of bioethics — protocol involving humans — was verified. It is weakened by the threat of extinction of the CEP/CONEP system. The historical conditions identified were the hypothesis that bioethics was born under the plagiarism of Potter to Jahr’s writings, and also the transition from Resolution (CNS) No. 196/96 to No. 466/12. Being at the forefront of both science and ethics applied to human research, the transversality of topics such as suborbital travel, triple viral vaccine against COVID-19 and the origin of SARS-CoV-2 served as a reference to the assertive role that bioethics can assume, even under the judgment of denialism/antiscientificism. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION. Public universities account for more than 95% of all Brazilian scientific production. Such prominence made state universities collaborate decisively to make the CEP/CONEP system viable. And the radicalization, in the previous government, of the attempts to extinguish it aimed at the publicuniversity autonomy, target of retaliations during the premeditated exasperation of COVID-19. The final considerations are: the hypothesis that Potter would have plagiarized Jahr’s bioethical imperative is valid; the transition between Resolutions No. 196/1996 and No. 466/2012 sedimented the social control over scientific research on humans, via the CEP/CONEP system; the threat of extinction of the CEP/CONEP network hovers over the Brazilian State, in tow of PL No. 7082/2017; the denialism and anti-scientificism of the previous government sought to undermine the public-university autonomy, responsible for more than 95% of scientific production in the country; the (premeditated) exasperation of COVID-19 franchised a state genocide against indigenous and quilombolas; all bioethics is ethnobioethics and in Brazil, to democratize is to academize; space tourism, in its research dimension, disregarded elementary precepts of bioethics, risking the individual and socio-environmental dignity of the participants; the weak support of the last government for studies capable of evaluating MMR as a protection factor against COVID-19 may have aggravated its lethality; it is possible that SARS-CoV-2 is an invention (artificial origin), which would make it illegal to patent vaccines specifically to combat COVID-19.