Brazil has experienced critical problems in relation to its education for decades; however, during the pandemic these problems seem to have been accentuated. When Covid-19 broke out, schools closed, but especially public schools found it very difficult to maintain distance learning, Brazil is a huge country, so the challenges were also immense [1]. Issues such as internet access, equipment availability, teacher training, support material and fear of return, among others, have made it difficult to maintain the quality of teaching [2]. But one must question whether keeping Brazilian classrooms closed for so long at least had a positive impact on the health of the population. It should be noted, of course, that several factors are concurrent for the incidence of cases and deaths by SARS-CoV-2 to be higher in a country or region. It is important to consider the erratic conduct of the Brazilian government in relation to the pandemic, especially its absence in the planning of the education sector during this period.

Some Brazilian data serve for analysis and discussion about the schooling, quality of education, income of its population, and the Covid-19 pandemic (see graphic below). While the perception of the fight against the pandemic is seen as chaotic in Brazil by the rest of the world [3], those with the highest education and income in Brazil continue to approve of the president. Contradiction? Not so much. If we consider the particularities of Brazilian society, it is possible to put forward some hypotheses.

One of these hypotheses suggests that the long closure of schools was not the best way to fight the pandemic, because Brazil is the country that kept its schools closed the most, and the results in the pandemic are known. Meanwhile, countries that opened their schools more quickly had no significant impact on the number of cases of the disease [4]. Another hypothesis can be suggested by the data from PISA, an international examination of quality in education, in which Brazil is among the last placed [5]. The relationship between the numbers of days of closed schools seems to be inversely proportional to the PISA results, if the countries with the best scores are observed (graph).

 Figure 1: Closed school, PISA ranking and Covid-19 deaths.

Therefore, even if the Brazilian president sabotages measures to confront the pandemic, such as the use of the mask, social distancing and valuing the vaccine, the better educated and wealthier continue to consider this politician as someone competent. So beyond the formal educational aspect, it is worth thinking about how this privileged social group gets informed. Latin America, and Brazil, have the highest rates of social network use in the world, being informed by them in a biased way [6], besides the growing discredit in the press. Therefore, the terrain is fertile for Fake News and conspiracy theories to spread in the population, including among those supposedly enlightened classes, allowing science denialism to spread in the country [7].

This Brazilian scientific denialism, represented by President Bolsonaro his lines, his speech, his intense use of social networks and his entourage of followers, also seems to influence the pandemic process. Cities and states in which the president had more votes also had more hospitalizations and deaths by Covid-19 [8]. Misinformation and lack of formal education seem to directly influence people's behavior towards the pandemic. A striking example was that there was a 141% increase in the number of cases and 164% more deaths in municipalities with a higher number of Bolsonaro supporters, two months after a statement by the president, in which he positioned himself against the non-pharmacological measures established to combat Covid-19, such as social distancing [9], for instance.

Perhaps this Brazilian phenomenon of denialism cannot be explained by the formal educational level; after all, a category that presented great adherence to the discourse contrary to science were the doctors [10]. A large part of the Brazilian medical community, an extremely privileged category in relation to education in Brazil has aligned with Bolsonaro, exactly in what is their professional role which is the treatment of the disease. While the president preached drugs without scientific proof against Covid-19, a considerable number of doctors, some experienced, others young, endorsed this speech and prescribed the same drugs, adding even a cocktail of other drugs, later called the kit-covid, preventively and early in the fight against Sars-Cov-2 [11]. It is not easy to find an explanation for this behavior of these professionals, possibly a dangerous mixture that includes ideology, economic interests, misinformation, and alienation through social networks and even religion, constitutes the justification for this conduct.

The phenomenon of disinformation reaching even supposedly well-informed categories is not exclusively Brazilian, the influential magazine; The Economist published a report (Sep 2nd, 2021) showing that the drug Ivermectin, a popular vermifuge has increasingly been prescribed in the US against Covid-19. This movement by doctors has forced the FDA (the US health regulatory agency) to issue a statement showing the reasons why this drug should not be used against Sars-Cov-2. Something that might seem obvious, after all several papers have already demonstrated this, but even such a statement should have little effect for those in the medical community aligned to denialism and conspiracy theories. After all some of these professionals have no longer been informed by academic means; their sources are mainly the social networks.

These issues need to be better researched, but they show the value of education, of scientific education, in refusing or aligning with scientific denialism, which may reach politics, education, and health, and reverberate to an entire population. The effects of this process are being felt in Brazil, not only in the health field, but also in the environmental area, with the denial of climate change and the role of environmental preservation in the mitigation of its effects. Therefore, there is a whole open field for investigation into the effects, which may dimension these effects of this dogmatic vision against science, which not only affects Brazil, but also occurs for example in Europe and the U.S., with the antivaccine movements, xenophobic [12], among others.

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