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Brasilia (AFP)
Brazilian Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga “tested positive for covid-19” after participating in the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, inaugurated by President Jair Bolsonaro, an official note from the South American country reported.
“The other members of the delegation carried out the test and were negative” for the virus, detailed the statement from the Special Secretariat for Communication (Secom).
Bolsonaro, who again showed himself without a mask on several occasions during the trip, is not vaccinated against covid-19 and has repeated that he will be “the last” Brazilian to receive the immunizer.
The minister’s infection is the second detected in Bolsonaro’s surroundings since he arrived in the US city. Queiroga was with the president at various events, including a meeting on Monday with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Although the delegation began to return to Brazil, Queiroga “will remain in the United States during the period of isolation,” the note added.
Vaccinated against the coronavirus, Queiroga, 55, “is doing well,” according to the official report.
In the evening, the head of Health wrote on Twitter that while he follows “all the health security protocols,” the ministry “will continue firm actions to confront the pandemic in Brazil.”
“We are going to defeat that virus!”
Without a health passport that enables him to enter restaurants and other public spaces in New York, the far-right president was photographed on Sunday with members of his entourage eating pizza standing on the street. The minister is the only one who appears in the image with a mask, although under his chin.
Questioned about his controversial handling of the pandemic, which leaves more than 591,000 dead in Brazil, Bolsonaro opened the United Nations General Assembly with a speech in which he made several misleading or imprecise statements, some of them related to the pandemic, according to a check from the AFP Factcheck team.
© 2021 AFP
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