Therapeutic Fascism and Public Health in Brazil: A Digital Ethnography of COVID Discourse

This book examines how unproven medical treatments became central to political, moral, and social life during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil.It develops the concept of therapeutic moral authoritarianism to explain how health practices were mobilized as forms of agency, belonging, and political expression in contexts of crisis and uncertainty. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with healthcare professionals, digital influencers, and patients engaged in the Early and Preventive Treatment movement, the book explores how scientific authority, moral values, and political imaginaries became entangled during the pandemic.It shows how individuals did not simply reject science but sought to inhabit and reinterpret it, transforming biomedical knowledge into a language of autonomy and resistance.The analysis situates these dynamics within broader histories of biopolitics, colonial medicine, and neoliberal governance, demonstrating how care and coercion, freedom and responsibility, are de