Brazilian Prosecutor General Paulo Gonet requested that the nation’s top court, the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), drop charges on Thursday against conservative former President Jair Bolsonaro on accusations of falsifying a Wuhan coronavirus vaccine card to enter the United States.
Gonet wrote in his request that the only evidence prosecutors could find for the claim was the testimony of Mauro Cid, a former aide of Bolsonaro’s, who claimed as part of a plea deal in relation to his own legal woes that he had helped Bolsonaro create a fraudulent card showing he had received a coronavirus vaccination product. Bolsonaro, a vocal critic of the novel inoculation products marketed against coronavirus during the height of the pandemic, visited the United States from December 2022 to March 2023, a period during which former President Joe Biden outlawed the entry into the country of foreigners without proof of ingestion of some form of coronavirus inoculation product.
That testimony alone, Gonet asserted, was not sufficient to proceed with a trial. The STF must now decide whether to accept or reject Gonet’s call to dismiss the case; the court typically defers to prosecutors in these matters, but does not necessarily have to.
The vaccine card case is one of three legal accusations against Jair Bolsonaro following his defeat in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election which led to a third term in power for incumbent socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro is also facing charges of allegedly organizing a coup to overturn the results of the 2022 election — including a sensational claim that Bolsonaro had plotted to poison Lula — and charges of illicitly enriching himself through the sale of jewelry gifted to the presidency by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Brazilian law requires the processing of such foreign gifts as items of the state, making it illegal for presidents to keep them as personal items.
According to the Brazilian newspaper O Globo, Gonet wrote in his petition that “no evidence” existed that vaccine cards for Bolsonaro and his daughter, a minor, were used to exit the country during the timeframe in which he was accused of using them.
“There is no evidence that the [vaccination] certificate was used, and it was said that it was rendered useless shortly after it was printed,” Gonet noted. The prosecutor added that no witness other than Cid corroborated the allegation in any way, nor did the prosecutor’s office find proof of the claim outside of Cid’s testimonies.
O Globo described the request to drop the case as unsurprising, citing legal scholars who described the vaccine card case as the “weakest” of the three.
When the charges originally surfaced in March 2024, the prosecutor accused Bolsonaro of conspiracy to commit fraud and inputting false information into government systems. The charges would have carried up to 12 years in prison for the former president, currently 70 years old. The formal charges arrived almost a year after Brazilian police raided Bolsonaro’s home seeking evidence related to the case.
Bolsonaro has publicly criticized coronavirus vaccine products for years and has openly stated that he did not seek to ingest any such product. Bolsonaro first tested positive for the virus in July 2020 after describing the illness as a “little cold” and made a rapid recovery.
Following the fraud accusations, Bolsonaro told reporters that he had never claimed to receive doses of any inoculation product and that he had never been asked for proof of vaccine product ingestion.
“I have never been asked for a vaccination card anywhere; there is no tampering on my part,” Bolsonaro told reporters in May 2023. “There isn’t. I didn’t take the vaccine and that’s it. I never denied that. There were people who pressured me to take the vaccine. Yes, natural. I decided not to take it because I read the Pfizer ‘leaflet’.”
The publicly known facts of the case have not yet clarified how Bolsonaro was allowed into the United States without proof of vaccination. Biden had banned all foreign nationals from entering the country without some proof of “vaccination,” leading to prominent denials of entry to internationally known figures. Among the most prominent cases was that of tennis player Novak Djokovic, who was banned from entering the United States in 2023, denying him the chance to compete at high-level tournaments while ranking as one of the world’s best players due to his refusal to consume any of the vaccine products approved by his native Serbia.
Bolsonaro spent about three months in Florida following his loss in the presidential election, sighted by locals in common sites such as the supermarket Publix and a KFC restaurant.
Bolsonaro issued a statement on Thursday describing the case against him on the coronavirus charges as “weak from the beginning” and a means to expand illegitimate investigations into his person, that he claimed were intended to keep him from running for president again. Lula’s government, as one of its first acts in office, banned Bolsonaro from running for any public office through 2030.
“After months of headlines, arbitrary arrests, searches and spectacles, they admitted the obvious: there was no evidence against me,” Bolsonaro wrote on Thursday. “They arrested my former aide-de-camp and other people, broke confidentiality, invaded homes, and even searched my underage daughter’s data. They made noise, lied, created narratives — all to try to harm me politically.”
“They have been flipping my life upside down since 2018. They have searched everything,” his statement continued. “And since they have not found a single act of corruption, they have had to invent false versions, create baseless investigations, and fabricate an accusation of a ‘coup’ to try to explain the reasons behind the trail of abuses, excesses, and illegalities committed by Alexandre de Moraes since he began leading the fake news investigation.”
STF Minister Alexandre de Moraes, one of the most powerful judges on the court, has spearheaded many of the investigations against Bolsonaro and his conservative allies as part of a great campaign against alleged “fake news.”
Bolsonaro concluded his statement suggesting that he will be a candidate in the 2026 presidential election.
“We will win! And in 2027, I will walk up the ramp of the Planalto Palace [presidential palace] with the support of the Brazilian people to continue my mission of defeating the crime that plagues Brazilians and bringing law and order back to Brazil!”
Prior to the call to drop the vaccine card case, the STF ruled on Wednesday that Bolsonaro will have to stand trial on charges of conspiring to overthrow Lula’s government. Bolsonaro faces as many as 39 years in prison on those charges.
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