Brazil’s Amazon Oxygen Crisis: How Lives and Health Were Sacrificed During the Peak of COVID-19 to Promote an Agenda with Long-Term Consequences for the Environment, Indigenous Peoples, and Health

In January 2021, oxygen supplies in the Amazon region’s largest city were allowed to run out at the peak of the second wave of the COVID-19 epidemic, shocking the world as hospital patients expired for lack of this basic medical resource in Manaus, which during the first COVID-19 wave had become the world’s first city to bury its dead in mass graves. Brazil’s authorities used this tragedy to further a political agenda that implies enormous environmental and human-rights consequences. Transport of oxygen was used to promote building a road that, together with its planned side roads, would give deforesters access to much of what remains of Brazil’s Amazon Forest. Here, we demonstrate that the logistical strategy adopted by the Jair Bolsonaro administration’s Ministries of Health and Infrastructure to bring oxygen to Manaus was the worst possible choice, and the foreseeable delay in the arrival of oxygen cost hundreds of lives. Rather than sending trucks to carry oxygen on the nearly impassible Highway BR-319 during the rainy season, the most appropriate transport option was barges on the Madeira River. As oxygen supplies dwindled in Manaus, the families of wealthier COVID-19 victims scrambled to buy the few remaining cylinders at prices out of reach for those in poorer (and often ethnically distinct) economic strata. Ethnic health disparities are aggravated by both the direct consequences of the oxygen crisis and, on the longer term, by the consequences of the highway project that political use of the crisis materially advanced.