Bolsonaro’s vaccination card fraud; understand how it worked

The final report by the Federal Police (PF) on the falsification of former president Jair Bolsonaro’s covid-19 vaccination certificate describes how a scheme set up by former presidential aide Mauro César Cid provided fraudulent certificates to at least nine people .

The PF reached its conclusions after collecting statements and investigating a series of evidence, including messages on cell phone applications, login records in Health systems and geolocation data of those investigated, among others.

The confidentiality of the PF’s final report was lifted this Tuesday (19) by order of Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), rapporteur of the investigation in which the investigations were conducted.

According to the PF, the scheme began in November 2021, when Cid asked Army Sergeant Luis Marcos dos Reis, his colleague in the Presidency’s Orders Assistance, to help him obtain a forged vaccination card for his wife Gabriela Santiago Cid.

Reis then contacted his nephew, doctor Farley Vinicius de Alcântara, who obtained a vaccination card from the Goiás State Department of Health, filled with two doses of the vaccine against Covid-19, in Gabriela’s name.

The vaccine data (date, batch, manufacturer, applicator) were taken from a vaccination card of a nurse who had been vaccinated in the city of Cabeceiras (GO), according to messages extracted from the cloud service in which Cid stored his WhatsApp messages .

This first forged vaccination card was produced with handwritten notes, and signed by Alcântara, a doctor who was Reis’ nephew. Using geolocation data, the PF showed that Gabriela Cid’s personal cell phone was in use in Brasília, on the day she allegedly took the vaccine in Cabeceiras.

When asked, the doctor recognized his signature and stamp on the document as authentic, but said he did not know whether the doses were actually administered. For the PF, he knew about the forgery after copying the information from another vaccination card. At the time of the events, he worked as a nurse on duty at the Cabeceiras hospital. Gabriela, in turn, admitted to investigators that she did not take the vaccine against Covid-19.

In a plea agreement, Lieutenant Colonel Mauro Cid admitted his involvement in the scheme and helped with the investigation.

Fake certificates

In possession of the falsified vaccination card, Cid said he sought out Army second sergeant Eduardo Crespo Alves, on November 23, 2021, so that he could help enter the document’s data into the ConecteSUS system, so that it would be possible to issue the vaccination certificate for covid-19.

The maneuver, however, did not work, as the attempt to enter the data into the system was made from Rio de Janeiro, while the batches of vaccines that appeared on the card were distributed to Goiás. Investigations indicate that Crespo was unaware of the falsity of the document . The procedure was later attempted by another soldier, called Paulo Sérgio da Costa Ferreira, also without success.

The attempt to insert false data into ConecteSUS would have been made through the city hall of São Gonçalo (RJ), with the registration of a person called Sonia, but she would have “prorated” upon learning of the illegality of the maneuver, investigations show.

The insertion of false data into ConecteSUS would only have been successful after former Army major Ailton Gonçalves Moraes Barros was called and managed to carry out the procedure in the municipality of Duque de Caxias, with new vaccine data, coming from a new false vaccination card. For the police, the registration of vaccines was carried out by the Secretary of Government of Duque de Caxias (RJ), João Carlos Brecha.

In his statement, Brecha said he did not know Ailton Barros and denied entering false data into ConecteSUS, but the PF was able to identify that the login to the system responsible for recording the information was done on his computer, through a modem installed in his home, in the Rio de Janeiro city of Niterói.

Once the scheme worked for Gabriela Cid, false vaccination records were also later inserted for Mauro Cid’s three daughters and also for Jair Bolsonaro and his daughter, Laura.

Max Guilherme Machado de Moura and Sergio Rocha Cordeiro, assistants to the former president, also benefited, according to investigations. The last person to have his false data included in ConecteSUS was deputy Gutemberg Reis (MDB-RJ). All insertions would have been made by Brecha, points out the PF.

In his award-winning collaboration, Mauro Cid confirmed the entire scheme and also stated “that he printed the certificates and delivered them to the then President of the Republic Jair Messias Bolsonaro”, says the PF report.

The objective of all fraudulent insertions of vaccination data into ConecteSUS was to issue vaccination certificates against Covid-19 to enter the United States for leisure trips.

Bolsonaro, Cid and 15 other people were indicted by the PF for various crimes related to falsifying vaccination certificates. The report was sent to Minister Alexandre de Moraes, who must now order the Federal Public Ministry to present its opinion on the police investigation.

Defenses

In his verified profile on X, lawyer Fabio Wajngarten, who represents Bolsonaro, said that the defense did not have access to the report and called the indictment of the former president “absurd”.

The defender wrote that “while [Bolsonaro] held the position of President, he was completely exempt from presenting any type of certificate on his trips. This is political persecution and an attempt to empty the enormous political capital that has only been growing.”

Bolsonaro has always denied that he took the covid-19 vaccine. “There is no adulteration on my part, there is none. I didn’t take the vaccine, period,” Bolsonaro told journalists in May 2023, when commenting on the investigations.

Federal deputy Gutemberg Reis said he will not speak out until his defense has full access to the process.

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