Gouveia e Melo says there is too little data to allow effective decisions

Vice Admiral Henrique Gouveia e Melo does not welcome his return to the Covid-19 task force, for fear of being seen as a modern day Dom Sebastião, which he says would be unhealthy for the country.

"I will always be available as part of the military, but I would like to see our society moving forward in another way: without any 'Sebastianism', because Sebastião is each one of us", said the former task force coordinator, at a conference  in Coimbra.

The military man defended that the country should give space to national institutions to solidify their capabilities, "at the risk of always going from exceptional process to exceptional process".

"My military role was to help put a bandage on the wound. The wound has closed and healed, now we need to live without bandages," said Gouveia e Melo

For the vice admiral, "to say 'bring Sebastião' is to prove that we have not learned anything as a country".

The country needs, he stressed, to be able to reunite the Order of Doctors, Nurses and the various entities of the Ministry of Health so that "this ecosystem can solve the problem of the third dose and whatever comes after".

At a conference in which he received a standing ovation, the former coordinator said that, currently, it is necessary to look boldly at the data on new infections and make decisions in a conscious manner.

"We have to analyse at this moment who is positive, it is necessary to have numbers and not panic. Is it not the people who have not been vaccinated who are becoming positive, therefore we must determine if this third, fourth or fifth dose will help," he asked.

Gouveia Melo also questioned how many people who are vaccinated are dying, and of those "under what conditions are they dying", stressing that, without this data, "it's all noise, which can mean we decide badly".

According to the military officer, Portugal has to look at the data and establish, "intelligently, the best strategy and then follow it with our capabilities, also giving space to national institutions to solidify their capabilities."

"We are going to try, in a coordinated way, to attack the problem in a rational way, looking at the data. Who is being infected? Nobody knows how to answer me. How many people are actually dying vaccinated? Were those people already 100 years old and living with 300 complications? Are they dying of respiratory infections or other things?" he asked.

For the former coordinator of the task force for the Covid-19 vaccination process, without studying the data it is not possible to make a conscious decision which is "not induced by the mimicry of things happening elsewhere".

"We have to believe in ourselves, in our institutions and give strength to our institutions, it is not only political war that will destroy our capabilities", he stressed.

© Gerardo Santos / Global Images 

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