A produção Científica sobre a pandemia da covid-19: o fomento à pesquisa e as diretrizes e ações da política de saúde no Brasil

Abstract

COVID-19 is a disease that emerged in China in late 2019 and soon became a pandemic. Science was intensely requested to bring solutions to the health crisis. This work aimed to: analyze the federal public support for research on COVID-19, identify the results generated from these researches and assess whether scientific studies supported the National Health Policy (PNS) in decision-making to face the pandemic. It is a qualitative research of the analytical documental type and the data collection was carried out in the period of 2020-2021. The public notices involving federal resources and documents from the Ministry of Health and the Presidency of the Republic were identified, bringing guidelines and actions to face the pandemic. The studies of Science, Technology and Society (STS) were used as a theoretical reference for the analysis in this work. Despite the budget constraints that the research sector had been suffering from, federal funding agencies were active and researchers and research institutes responded well to public calls with a significant number of proposed projects. However, funds and research themes were directed predominantly to the area of biological sciences, and the area of humanities and social sciences was little contemplated. The federal government's actions to face the pandemic were directed more towards the care of the sick than towards measures to contain the disease and the coordination of strategies to face the pandemic at the national level was deficient. There was little concern on the part of the federal government's public health policies to base the conduct to face the pandemic on scientific evidence. It is considered that the federal government's intervention in facing the health crisis was not completely effective, both in terms of research due to the low investment in multidisciplinary studies in the face of a complex individual and collective psychosocial context resulting from the pandemic, and in relation to its performance regarding effective measures to combat the high mortality of the disease evidenced by scientific research that should support government decisions for better results in public health policies.